Several prominent institutional investors concerned about climate change have announced their intention or have divested from fossil fuel shares, to limit their exposure to the industry. The act of fossil fuel divestment may directly depress share prices or stigmatize the industry’s reputation, resulting in lower share value. While there has been considerable research conducted on the performance of the fossil fuel industry, there is not yet any empirical evidence that divestment announcements influence share prices. Adopting an event study methodology, this study measures abnormal deviations in stock prices of the top 200 global oil, gas, and coal companies by proven reserves, on days of prominent divestment announcements. Events are analyzed independently and in aggregate. The results make several notable contributions. While many events experienced short-term negative abnormal returns around the event day, the effects of events were more pronounced over longer event windows following the New York Climate March, suggesting a shift in investor perception. The results also find that divestment announcements related to campaigns, pledges, and endorsements all have a significant effect over the short-term event window. Finally, the results control for the general underperformance of the industry over the estimation window, attesting that the price change is caused by divestment announcements. Several robustness tests using alternate expected returns models and statistical tests were conducted to ensure the accuracy of the result. Overall, this study finds that divestment announcements decrease the share price of the fossil fuel companies, and thus, we conclude that ‘divestors’ can influence the share price of their target companies. Theoretically, the result adds new knowledge regarding the efficacy of the efficient market hypothesis in relation to divestment.

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(1) Background: Green finance standards have proliferated with much need for harmonization to accelerate global green financial flows. However, little is known on the nature of green finance standards that accelerates differentiation, rather than harmonization. Therefore, we embark to answer the question what the nature of green finance standards is and specifically how green finance standards have evolved in major economic systems driven by different actors and leading to differences and commonalities over time and environmental focus area. (2) Methods: To analyze the question, we build a model based on institutional and standards theory and apply text analysis and statistical methods to analyze 84 green finance standards issued from 1998 to 2020. (3) Results: we find clear evidence that green finance standards evolve depending on economic governance types (e.g., market-based, government-based and in weak institutional environments), environmental focus areas (e.g., pollution, climate, biodiversity) and depend on actors in government, intermediaries and developing financial institutions. We also show that this development has been dynamic over the last few decades. We further test and confirm three models of green finance standards: output-based, input-based and process standards that have evolved. With the findings, we aim to provide a better foundation for both research and policy in future green finance standard research, development and harmonization.

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