Asset Pricing with Disagreement about Climate Risks

Thomas Lontzek, Walt Pohl, Karl Schmedders, Marco Thalhammer, Ole Wilms

2023 | Academic | Climate, Risk & Performance

This paper analyzes how climate risks are priced on financial markets. We show that climate tipping thresholds, disagreement about climate risks, and preferences that price in long-run risks are crucial to an understanding of the impact of climate change on asset prices. Our model simultaneously explains several findings that have been established in the empirical literature on climate finance: (i) news about climate change can be hedged in financial markets, (ii) the share of green investors has significantly increased over the past decade, (iii) investors require a positive, although small, climate risk premium for holding 'brown' assets, and (iv) 'green' stocks outperformed 'brown' stocks in the period 2011-2021.