Guest lecture by Dr. Jean-Charles Rochet
Join the Desautels Faculty of Management for a lecture:
Corporate green bonds: Do they really make a difference or is it just green washing?
featuring visiting professor Dr. Jean-Charles Rochet
Professor of Banking, University of Geneva
Date: Wednesday, April 3, 2019
Time: 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm, followed by a reception 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Location: Donald E. Armstrong Building, 3420 McTavish, Room 370
Please register before March 29, 2019
About the topic
Green bonds are bonds whose proceeds are committed to finance environmental and climate-friendly projects. Since 2013, issuance of corporate green bonds worldwide has doubled every year. This is what Morgan Stanley calls the "green bond boom". Many commentators (e.g., FT 2015) are skeptical about their real impact on the environment. This is because the "greenness" of bonds is not legally enforceable. However, recent analyses (e.g., Flammer 2018) have found evidence that green bonds do work: they improve the environmental performance of issuing firms and increase their value for shareholders. A tentative explanation is that more and more investors are concerned by the environment, and could accept lower yields if they are convinced that their money will finance truly green projects. But this channel seems insufficient to explain the success of green bonds: yield differences between green and classical bonds are minuscule (only a few basis points). We show that another channel, which we call the signaling channel, may be more important.
About the speaker
Jean-Charles Rochet is Professor of Banking at University of Geneva, Senior Chair and Head of Research at Swiss Finance Institute, and research associate at Zurich University and Toulouse School of Economics. He holds a Ph.D. in mathematical economics from Paris University. He has taught at the Toulouse School of Economics, the London School of Economics, and has visited many universities and central banks all over the world. He was President of the Econometric Society in 2012 and has been a Fellow of this society since 1995. He has published more than 90 articles in international scientific journals and 7 books, including “Microeconomics of Banking” (with X. Freixas) MIT Press, “Balancing the Banks” (with M. Dewatripont and J. Tirole) and “Why are there so many banking Crises?” Princeton UP. His research interests include banking, financial stability and sustainable finance.
