Biodiversity Footprints and the Cross-Section of Stock Returns
Abstract: I study whether firms' negative impact on biodiversity is priced in global equity markets, using firm-level biodiversity footprints for more than 10,000 listed firms across 57 countries. Footprints are highly concentrated in consumer staples, energy, and materials, strongly right-skewed, tightly rank-correlated across environmental pressure channels, and closely tied to firm size and greenhouse-gas emissions, so that a portfolio sorted on the raw footprint is largely a bet on size. Around the 2021 Kunming Declaration, high-footprint firms earn lower abnormal returns on the adoption day, but the event day is not distinguishable from ordinary days once the estimation window is widened. In a long-short strategy, once firms are sorted on their footprint within size quintiles, high-footprint firms outperform low-footprint firms by roughly half a percentage point per month from November 2021 to December 2025, significant at the five percent level in every specification that includes a brown-minus-green carbon factor. Neutralising size exposes a second imbalance: conditional on market capitalisation, high-footprint firms tilt toward value. The premium survives within countries and within sectors, though it is estimated over a single macro cycle.
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Presentations: Brown Bag Seminar, Lunch Seminar (planned), Department of Finance, University of Luxembourg (2026)
Climate Fairness and Growth: Allocating the Remaining Carbon Budget (with Galina Hale, Michael Halling, and Nora Paulus) NBER WP34978 CEPR DP21287 SSRN
Abstract: Limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees requires that cumulative carbon dioxide emissions remain within a finite remaining carbon budget. How this budget is allocated across countries raises questions of fairness and development. This paper evaluates whether equity-based carbon allocations are compatible with sustained economic growth in emerging and developing economies. We compute country-level fair shares of the remaining carbon budget under the equal-cumulative-per-capita (ECPC) principle. Using data for 162 countries between 1950 and 2023, we then estimate the historical relationship between income and per-capita CO2 emissions across income groups and use these elasticities to simulate cumulative emissions until 2050. Our results show that ECPC implies strongly negative remaining carbon budgets for most advanced economies, while lower-income countries retain positive but constrained allocations. Under historically observed income-emissions elasticities, many developing countries would exceed their fair shares when converging toward advanced-economy income levels. At the aggregate level, unused allocations offset only 17% of the combined carbon budget shortfall implied by countries exceeding their allocation and the negative fair shares arising from historical responsibilities. In a scenario in which we assume that the technology of advanced economies is transferred to all countries, the carbon budget coverage increases to 38%.
Presentations: India Sustainable Growth Hub Webinar, International Growth Centre (2026)*; 101st Annual Conference of the Western Economic Association International, Denver (2026)*; 9th Inclusive & Sustainable Finance Research Conference, University of Luxembourg (2024)
Subsidies and Household Technology Adoption: Evidence from the Belgian Auto Market (with François Koulischer, Christophe Spaenjers, and Justin Delloye)
Presentations: The 2026 Climate and Energy Finance Conference (RCEA), Universidad Pontificia Comillas, Madrid (2026); Brown Bag Seminar, Department of Finance, University of Luxembourg (2026, 2024); Belgian Environmental Economics Day, Brussels (2025)*
*Presented by co-author