Friday Lunch Meeting, Olivier David Zerbib, January 17th 2020

 

I demonstrate how sustainable investing through exclusionary screening and environmental, social and governance (ESG) integration affects asset returns. I develop an asset pricing model with partial segmentation and disagreement among investors. I characterize two exclusion premia generalizing Merton’s (1987) premium on neglected stocks and a taste premium that disentangles the link between ESG and financial performance. By constructing an instrument that captures sustainable investors’ tastes for green firms, I estimate this model applied to green investing and sin stock exclusion using U.S. data between 2000 and 2018. The model outperforms the four-factor model, and yields a taste and an exclusion effect of 1.5% and 2.5% per year, respectively.