Climate investment research: 11x new research on digital productivity, crimes, ESG fees, green home bias, disclosure, infrastructure, brown news, ECB impact, shareholder engagement, and public-private deals
Social and ecological research
Digital productivity limits: Digitalisation and productivity: gamechanger or sideshow? by Robert Anderton, Vasco Botelho, Paul Reimers as of March 9th, 2023 (#26): „We use a large balance sheet panel dataset comprising more than 19 million European firm-level observations … the firm that exhibits on average a higher share of investment in digital technologies will exhibit a faster rate of TFP (Soe: total factor productivity) growth … Digitalisation does not seem to have relatively stronger impacts on the productivity of frontier firms compared to laggards, nor does it help to turn laggards into frontier firms. … Digital technologies … seem more like a sideshow for most firms, who attempt to be increasingly digital but are not able to adequately reap its productivity gains” (abstract).
Pollution leads to crimes: Symptom or Culprit? Social Media, Air Pollution, and Violence by Xinming Du as of March 9th, 2023 (#6): „… Together with higher air pollution, I find more aggressive behaviors both online and offline, as well as worse health outcomes near refineries. A one standard deviation increase in surrounding VOCs (Sö: volatile organic compounds) leads to 0.16 more hate crimes against Black people and 0.23 more hospital visits per thousand people each day. … On days with pollution spikes, surrounding areas see 30% more offensive and racist tweets and 12% more crimes; those geographically distant but socially networked regions also see offensive and racist tweets increase by 3% and more crimes by 4.5% …” (abstract).
Responsible and climate investment research
Higher ESG fees: Capitalists or fiduciary conscious agents? ESG mutual fund fees and investor sophistication by Wei Wei and Anna (Ania) Zalewska as of March 16th, 2023 (#19): “We use a sample of 2,055 U.S. equity mutual funds … and find that fund families do exploit retail ESG investor’s low performance sensitivity when setting fees of ESG funds. In contrast, we find no evidence of such practices in the sample of institutional funds. Moreover, we find that the exploitative fee setting practices observed in the retail sample are driven by marketing fees and not by operating fees“ (abstract).
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