Risk Management Best Practice
Behavioural Finance
This project uses the tools of modern finance and risk management to measure and model environmental risks. Environmental risks can be thought of as long run risks which naturally influence portfolio decisions including insurance. This study examines publicly traded environmental portfolios and develops portfolios which will be published on the widely viewed and celebrated web site — VLAB.stern.nyu.edu. The volatility of such portfolios will be a measure of the new information on environmental risk. If investors hold these assets, then the cost of capital will be lower for firms in long positions in these portfolios and will be higher for those that are shorted. Because the benefits of these portfolio strategies and of associated public policies are in the distant future, the benefits must be discounted back to the present. The discount rate is extremely important in this calculation. We are carrying out new research that will improve our estimates of the discount rate using modern finance tools.
university
| University: | McGill University |
| Project Lead: | Jim Engle-Warnick |
Lead Researcher
Jim Engle-Warnick
Jim Engle-Warnick is an experimental economist and Associate Professor of Economics at McGill University. He previously held a Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship in the Economics Group at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Jim holds a BSEE from the University of Akron, an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University and a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. His research focus is on the behaviour of trust, price dispersion, buyer concentration, and central bank decision-making.