5 Questions With Gernot Wagner, Climate Economist
Professor Gernot Wagner discusses his work in climate economics, his views on urgent climate policy challenges, and what makes him optimistic for the future.
New research challenges the accepted wisdom that shunning companies that fail to meet your values puts pressure on them or puts them out of business.
Columbia Business School Professor Bruce Usher discusses his new book, which outlines the risks and opportunities for investors from climate change, and how current students and alumni are addressing major environmental challenges.
Three takeaways from the 2022 Brazil Climate Summit held at Columbia Business School’s Manhattanville campus
This paper aims to unpack the pro-social motivations of green innovators. In a field experiment inviting SBIR grantees to learn more about and apply to MIT Solve, we provide scientifically valid scenarios varying the time-frame and scale of human cost of climate change. Innovators' response in clicks and applications increases with both scale and immediacy treatments. Our structural model estimates a welfare discount rate of 0.76%, providing a measure of innovators' value of future generations, and an elasticity to lives lost of 0.23, implying diminishing marginal concern to human loss.
We exploit regional variations in exposure to heat stress to study if physical climate risk is priced in municipal and corporate bonds as well as in equity markets. We find that local exposure to damages related to heat stress equaling 1% of GDP is associated with municipal bond yield spreads that are higher by around 15 basis points per annum (bps), the effect being larger for longer-term, revenue-only and lower-rated bonds, and arising mainly from the expected increase in energy expenditures and decrease in labor productivity.
Chazen Senior Scholar Geoffrey Heal outlines three major barriers to the decarbonization of electric power generation on a global scale.
Professor Gernot Wagner discusses his work in climate economics, his views on urgent climate policy challenges, and what makes him optimistic for the future.
New research challenges the accepted wisdom that shunning companies that fail to meet your values puts pressure on them or puts them out of business.