Essays in Sustainable Finance

Over the past decade, sustainable finance has become an established part of global financial markets. As its expansion slows amid greater scrutiny of sustainability claims, evolving sustainability standards and political resistance in some jurisdictions, understanding when and how sustainability considerations affect financial outcomes has become increasingly important. This thesis examines how sustainability-related risks, investor preferences and information influence asset valuations, secondary-market trading, product-management decisions by financial intermediaries and investor flows across four settings: climate litigation, green bonds, sustainable mutual funds and sustainability labels. The first chapter examines stock market reactions to climate lawsuit filings and adverse court decisions involving corporations in North America and Europe. It finds generally limited reactions for both targeted firms and their industry peers, although responses vary across cases and industries. The second chapter compares the secondary-market trading of green and conventional bonds using transaction data provided by Euroclear. Green bonds exhibit higher aggregate trading volumes because they trade on a larger share of days, despite smaller average transaction sizes. The third chapter studies liquidation decisions among European equity mutual funds. While sustainable funds do not exhibit a robustly different liquidation risk on average, they face a higher risk shortly after inception, with the difference disappearing as funds mature. The fourth chapter investigates investor responses to the reform of the French ISR label. Holding or acquiring the label is not associated with detectably higher investor flows, whereas funds losing it under the tightened requirements experience persistently weaker flows than funds retaining it. Taken together, the four chapters show that sustainability considerations may affect financial markets through different mechanisms. The findings point towards a more selective and differentiated sustainable finance market, whose long-term development will depend increasingly on the financial materiality of sustainability-related risks, the viability of sustainable products and the credibility of sustainability standards and information.