Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia

Climate change has a significant impact on the global economy and financial markets, making climate risk and uncertainty central to asset pricing decisions. These risks include potential economic losses due to extreme weather events or gradual changes and can impact business redundancy, infrastructure stability, and approval channels. We review the main theoretical models that incorporate climate risk in asset pricing and the empirical methods to assess the existence of a climate risk premium.

The aim of this study is to examine the literature on climate risk definition and measures and the impact of climate risk on stock returns. We review how asset pricing models (and their testable implications) consider climate risk as a residual systemic risk driver in excess of either standard market risk factors or latent factors identified with business and financial cycles. Firms less exposed to transition risk, in equilibrium, should face a lower cost of equity financing, given an expected return lower than the one associated with pollutant firms. The existence of a recent outperformance of realized returns on green stocks can be reconciled with unexpected shifts in investors tastes for green assets. Finally, we identify some issues regarding the empirical approach and suggest several potential areas for future research.

The relationship between prices and volatility of energy assets (primarily oil and gas) is of paramount importance for investors and policy makers. We construct a volatility index for the European oil and gas market based on a model-free approach to obtain a European counterpart of US volatility indices for the energy market, such as the CBOE Crude Oil Volatility Index (OVX). Given that investors are averse to volatility of losses, but appreciate volatility of gains, we also derive risk measures that focus on positive and negative returns and their imbalance. We assess whether the constructed indices have predictive power on future returns. We show that in the medium term all the risk indices behave as market greed indicators, whereas in the short term they behave as fear indicators since rises in risk indices are linked with negative returns. The implications for investors and policy-makers are outlined.