People and investor attention to climate change

Abstract

The paper analyses whether people’s attention to climate change emergency contributes to the stock market returns by accounting for the mitigation role of the corporate social performance proxied by ESG score. We address one research question: how does climate change attention affect the investors’ trading behavior and, consequently, the stock price returns of local firms? The Google Search Volume Index (GSVI) is used to evaluate the attention parameter. In a global setting, made by 2941 stocks in both advanced and emerging economies between 2006 and 2019, we revealed that attention to climate change helps investors to have a significantly positive effect on returns of stocks with high ESG scores compared to low sustainable stocks. Moreover, we observe an interesting changing in the relationship between corporate social performance and people attention, when deepening the analysis from the perspective of sectorial distribution. Our results are robust to different risk factor models, environmental policy stringency framework, sin industries focus, and when changing people’s attention indicator.