Chapter 55: Mining for “Green Diamonds” — Value Relevance of Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Using an international dataset of 5,861 firm-year observations between 2009 and 2016 obtained from the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), we analyze the effect of firms’ Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions on stock price performance. To this end, we first discuss former research which finds an equity discount entailed by high levels of GHG emissions. We then focus on additional metrics of stock price performance, namely stock price return and stock price risk. Interestingly, we do not find any significant impact of GHG emissions on these metrics. A possible explanation is that investors are not yet able to quantify the GHG emission risk due to insufficient disclosure.