Sustainable finance for a sustainable society

The European Commission has recently launched a large market consultation for accelerating the transition towards sustainable finance. The Commission raises the following two issues in particular: (i) the need for a long-term focus by companies and investors in order to integrate Environmental (E), Social (S), and Governance (G) factors, or ESG, into their decision-making processes; (ii) the need for redirecting investor money to sustainable products in order to accelerate the transition towards a sustainable society. The workshop will discuss and brainstorm with master students some of the issues to address collectively these goals.
In particular, we will discuss the following two topics: (i) the information content of sustainable information provided by rating agencies, (ii) the conditions under which shareholders can favour a sustainable transition for the investee firm.