Recent trends in the project finance industry include an increasing volume and a growing awareness of sustainable development. This has raised the question of whether and a how voluntary code of conduct such as the Equator Principles (EP) could enhance its impact on the project finance industry. We apply an event study methodology, and also consider the market model and conditional variance. We find positive abnormal returns for financial institutions adopting the EP, which supports the reputational risk hypothesis. Furthermore, we document that adopters outperform the global project finance market, especially in terms of market share. However, we do not find evidence that non‐adopters are excluded from lending syndicates. Results include practical recommendations for environmental policy. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

In this paper we examine stock price reactions to mergers and acquisitions in a particular industry, the renewable energy industry. We focus on acquirers and document positive abnormal returns on a sample of 337 completed M & A-transactions announced during 2000 to 2009. We show that acquirer size, market-to-book ratio and deals announced in the recent financial crisis negatively correlate with acquirer returns. Acquirers from outside the renewable industry tend to earn positive abnormal results.