IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/chf/rpseri/rp2191.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Building Benchmarks Portfolios with Decreasing Carbon Footprints

Author

Listed:
  • Eric Jondeau

    (Swiss Finance Institute; University of Lausanne - Faculty of Business and Economics (HEC Lausanne); Swiss Finance Institute)

  • Benoît Mojon

    (Bank for International Settlements (BIS))

  • Luiz A. Pereira da Silva

    (Bank for International Settlements (BIS))

Abstract

In this paper, we build portfolios with decreasing carbon footprint, which passive investors can use as new Paris-consistent (PC) benchmarks and have the same risk- adjusted returns as business as usual (BAU) benchmarks. As the distribution of firms' carbon intensity is very skewed, excluding a small fraction of highly polluting firms can massively reduce the carbon footprint of a portfolio of corporate stocks. We identify the worst polluters globally, exclude them from the portfolio, and re- allocate the proceeds so as to keep sectoral and regional exposures similar to those of the business as usual (BAU) benchmark. This approach limits divestment from corporates in Emerging Countries that would result from implementing exclusions and reinvestment without the objective of preserving regional exposures. We show that reducing the carbon footprint of the portfolio by 64% in 10 years would be obtained by excluding sequentially up to 11% of the corporates, which together amount to less than 6% of the global market portfolio. While this reallocation preserves regional and sectoral exposures similar to those of the BAU benchmark, it does not change its risk-adjusted return. We define PC benchmark portfolios at the global level, for Emerging Countries, Europe, North America, and the Pacific.

Suggested Citation

  • Eric Jondeau & Benoît Mojon & Luiz A. Pereira da Silva, 2021. "Building Benchmarks Portfolios with Decreasing Carbon Footprints," Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper Series 21-91, Swiss Finance Institute.
  • Handle: RePEc:chf:rpseri:rp2191
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3987186
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Gong Cheng & Eric Jondeau & Benoît Mojon, 2022. "Building portfolios of sovereign securities with decreasing carbon footprints," Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper Series 22-66, Swiss Finance Institute.
    2. Anquetin, Théophile & Coqueret, Guillaume & Tavin, Bertrand & Welgryn, Lou, 2022. "Scopes of carbon emissions and their impact on green portfolios," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 115(C).
    3. Ricardo Crisostomo, 2022. "Measuring Transition Risk in Investment Funds," Papers 2210.15329, arXiv.org, revised Dec 2022.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Portfolio carbon footprint; Green and brown assets; Alignment with Paris Agreement;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
    • G24 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Investment Banking; Venture Capital; Brokerage
    • Q56 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Environment and Development; Environment and Trade; Sustainability; Environmental Accounts and Accounting; Environmental Equity; Population Growth

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:chf:rpseri:rp2191. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Ridima Mittal (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/fameech.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.