Hedging Climate Change News
47 Pages Posted: 8 Apr 2019 Last revised: 26 Oct 2022
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Hedging Climate Change News
Hedging Climate Change News
Hedging Climate Change News
Date Written: April 2019
Abstract
We propose and implement a procedure to dynamically hedge climate change risk. To create our hedge target, we extract innovations from climate news series that we construct through textual analysis of high-dimensional data on newspaper coverage of climate change. We then use a mimicking portfolio approach based on a large panel of equity returns to build climate change hedge portfolios. We discipline the exercise by using third-party ESG scores of firms to model their climate risk exposures. We show that this approach yields parsimonious and industry-balanced portfolios that perform well in hedging innovations in climate news both in-sample and out-of-sample. The resulting hedge portfolios outperform alternative hedging strategies based primarily on industry tilts. We discuss multiple directions for future research on financial approaches to managing climate risk.
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