Document Type

Dissertation

First Faculty Advisor

Ascioglu, Asli

Keywords

"Green, " Environmentally Conscious, Carbon Disclosure Project, CDP, Climate Change, Carbon Dioxide, Industry Reactions, Business Risks and Impacts

Publisher

Bryant University

Abstract

Environmentally conscious decision making has become a prominent topic in business that has the potential to affect the public opinion and performance of companies. This project seeks to identify whether or not positive changes in excess return might offer an incentive for companies to adopt green initiatives. It examines the ways in which companies’ green initiatives, as measured by their annual Carbon Disclosure Project S&P 500 Climate Change Report score, impact their stock price. In other words, is there value in “going green”? It is hypothesized that companies exhibiting greater variance in their environmental initiatives from one year to the next (whether positive or negative) will see larger impacts on their stock price surrounding the release date of the rankings. This paper is an event study comparing the magnitude of the change in a company’s annual Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) score to the magnitude of their percentage excess return change in stock price. In the end, the hypothesis was not proven to be true because the results were not statistically significant.

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