Qiping (Jimmy) Huang, an assistant professor in the Department of Finance, and co-author Meimei Lin from Georgia Southern University gave a presentation at the virtual 2020 JEEM-Edinburgh-Shanghai Climate and Development Conference in December, 2020. Huang and Lin presented their paper “How Climate Risk Beliefs Shape Corporate Social Responsibility?” The paper examines how local climate risk beliefs affect firms’ decision making in corporate social responsibility (CSR) commitment.
“We find that firms’ environmental, social and governance (ESG) scores are higher if they are located in the counties where more people believe in global climate change,” said Huang. “We use natural disasters as exogenous shocks to the beliefs about climate risk, and continue to find a positive association between CSR and perceptions of climate risk and we found the correlation between CSR and climate risk beliefs is stronger when firms have more local investors.”
The conference was organized by the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (JEEM); the University of Edinburgh Business School, United Kingdom; Shanghai Institute of International Finance Centre, SUFE, China; and Shanghai Lixin University of Accounting and Finance, China.