The Response of Local Corporate Sustainability to Environmental Disasters: Evidence from Wildfires

Seminar abstract

Environmental disasters are thought to increase the focus on corporate sustainability in the communities where they occur.

Extracting data on wildfires (a frequent type of disaster in the U.S.), and using two ESG rating agencies and EPA air enforcement actions to construct measures of local corporate sustainability, this presentation studies this conjecture.

It shows that severe wildfires in a county increase significantly its corporate environmental sustainability in the following year.

The impact is not homogeneous across counties: it is significant only in counties where the percentage of anthropogenic climate change believers is high, or where the majority of voters are Democrats.

Booking

This seminar is free to attend.

Please email EFiC@essex.ac.uk for more details on how you can join this seminar.

Speaker bio

Ioannis Branikas and is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Lundquist College of Business at the University of Oregon.

He read for his PhD at Princeton University.

His research interests include the areas of Household Finance, Corporate Social Responsibility and Mutual Funds.

His research has been published in world leading academic journals such as the Journal of Financial Economics and the Financial Planning Review.