Published Papers

Hedging Climate Change News, with Robert Engle, Stefano Giglio, Bryan Kelly and Johannes Stroebel, August 2019. SSRN, VoxEU, Data, Harvard Law School

Review of Financial Studies (2019)

We propose and implement a procedure to dynamically hedge climate change risk. To create our hedge target, we extract innovations in climate news series that we construct through textual analysis of high-dimensional data on newspaper coverage of climate change. We then use a mimicking-portfolio approach to build climate change hedge portfolios using a large panel of equity returns. We discipline the exercise by using third-party ESG scores of firms to model their climate risk exposures. We show that this approach yields parsimonious and industry-balanced portfolios that perform well in hedging innovations in climate news both in sample and out of sample. The resulting hedge portfolios outperform alternative hedging strategies based primarily on industry tilts. We discuss multiple directions for future research on financial approaches to managing climate risk.

Do Credit Supply Shocks Affect Fertility Choices? (2022), with Jeong Ho (John) Kim and Sung Kwan Lee

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance(2022)

We empirically investigate the role of credit supply in fertility decisions. Using the U.S. banking deregulation in the 1980s and the 2007–2009 Great Recession as two different laboratories for credit supply shocks, we find that an increase in credit supply consistently implies higher fertility rates, as well as higher propensity to have a child. This relation, which is economically and statistically significant, differs across individuals: It is more pronounced for young women and for families with unemployed husbands. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence that increased credit access leads to more optimistic expectations about personal prospects, and in turn, higher fertility rates.