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This entry pertains to the 2025 Baruch-JFQA Climate Finance and Sustainability Conference. I was only able to attend the second day, and I summarize my reactions to each of the papers followed by some outstanding questions at the end.
Introduction
I attended the second annual Baruch-JFQA Climate Finance and Sustainability Conference and presented my paper “Climate Capitalists.” My colleague Pari Sastry (one of the most knowledgable person in climate finance) highly recommended it, and the event certainly delivered.
Panel Discussion
The day began with a panel featuring practitioners with diverse backgrounds:
- Linda-Eling Lee (Founding Director and Head of the MSCI Sustainability Institute)
- Dan Labovitz (Co-Founder and CEO of Green Impact Exchange, GIX)
- Nehan Naim (ESG Strategy Officer, NYC Office of the Comptroller)
- Marc Siegel (former partner, PWC, Former FASB & SASB Board Member)
A recurring theme throughout the discussion was the need to estimate and communicate the financial value of sustainable investing. The panelists converged on the notion that relying solely on non-pecuniary motives would be insufficient to drive the scale of capital allocation needed for meaningful climate action.
Session: Corporate Climate Strategies
- Adair Morse presented her paper, “Roy Sorting: Climate and Status Quo Strategies” whose central premise is refreshingly clear: companies face a choice between embracing the green transition or maintaining business-as-usual operations. Just as Roy models predict that the best fishers fish and the best hunters hunt, the authors examine whether firms optimally sort themselves into climate strategies based on their comparative advantages. Using a dataset of ESG score edits (a clever proxy for strategic signaling), they document that firms making these adjustments experience a sizable bump in stock prices. However, this effect disappears in jurisdictions with stricter environmental policies like Europe and Japan, suggesting either that regulations are forcing convergent transition paths or that firms in these regions have become adept at obscuring their true strategies. For the Roy sorting mechanism to apply, there must be clear economic advantages to each strategy—some firms should profit more by staying brown, while others benefit more from going green. Given the profound uncertainty in this domain, I found these results somewhat surprising. The discussion by Xiaoyun Yu (SHAIF) was excellent.