Steven Ongena, "Too-Big-To-Strand?" Bond Versus Bank Financing in the Transition to a Low-Carbon Economy, In: Tinbergen Finance Research Seminars. 2022. (Conference Presentation)

What is the role market- and bank-based debt play in the climate transition process? We present evidence that bond markets price the risk that assets held by fossil fuel firms strand, while banks in the syndicated loan market seemingly do not price this risk much. Consequently, to fulfill their financing needs fossil fuel firms increasingly rely less on bonds and more on loans. We can interpret the within-firm bond-to-loan substitution along stranding risk as a contraction in the supply of bond versus bank funding. Within the banking sector especially the big banks are willing to provide cheaper and more financing to fossil fuel firms. |
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Florian Berg, Julian Kölbel, Roberto Rigobon, Aggregate Confusion: The Divergence of ESG Ratings, Review of Finance, Vol. forthcoming, 2022. (Journal Article)

This paper investigates the divergence of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings based on data from six prominent ESG rating agencies: KLD, Sustainalytics, Moody’s ESG (Vigeo-Eiris), S&P Global (RobecoSAM), Refinitiv (Asset4), and MSCI. We document the rating divergence and map the different methodologies onto a common taxonomy of categories. Using this taxonomy, we decompose the divergence into contributions of scope, measurement, and weight. Measurement contributes 56% of the divergence, scope 38%, and weight 6%. Further analyzing the reasons for measurement divergence, we detect a rater effect where a rater’s overall view of a firm influences the measurement of specific categories. The results call for greater attention to how the data underlying ESG ratings are generated. |
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Thomas Weschle, Thorsten Hens, Grosse Ambitionen: Ehemaliger Vontobel-Banker will nachhaltige Kryptoanlagen schaffen, In: www.finanzen.ch, 23 May 2022. (Media Coverage)

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Barbara Widmer, Thorsten Hens, Wir erleben Zeitenwende an Finanzmärkten, In: Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen SRF, 23 May 2022. (Media Coverage)

Rund um den Globus sind die Kurse an den Finanzmärkten ins Minus gerutscht: Der Krieg in der Ukraine, hohe Teuerungsraten und Lieferengpässe drücken auf die Stimmung an den Börsen. Der Finanzexperte Thorsten Hens sagt: «Wir erleben gerade eine Zeitenwende an den Finanzmärkten.»
«An den Börsen geht die Angst um» oder «Weltwirtschaft droht perfekter Sturm.» So lauten die Schlagzeilen aus der Finanzwelt in den letzten Tagen. Die Schweizer Börse steht mit einem Minus von elf Prozent seit Anfang Jahr noch vergleichsweise gut da. Andere Finanzplätze hat es noch schlimmer erwischt. Hohe Tagesverluste wecken bereits Erinnerungen an die Finanzkrise 2008 oder an die geplatzte Dotcom-Blase zu Beginn des Jahrtausends.
Thorsten Hens forscht zu den Ursachen der aktuell ruppigen Börsenzeiten und möglichen Folgen für die Finanzwelt. Am Institut für Banking und Finance der Universität Zürich untersucht der Finanzprofessor die Psychologie des Investierens. Hens ist zudem außerordentlicher Professor für Finanzen an der Norwegischen Handelshochschule in Bergen, Norwegen. |
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Anastasia Ruvimova, Alexander Lill, Jan Gugler, Lauren Howe, Elaine Huang, Gail Murphy, Thomas Fritz, An Exploratory Study of Productivity Perceptions in Software Teams, In: International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'22), ACM, Pittsburgh, PA, 2022. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
 
Software development is a collaborative process requiring a careful balance of focused individual effort and team coordination. Though questions of individual productivity have been widely examined in past literature, less is known about the interplay between developers' perceptions of their own productivity as opposed to their team’s. In this paper, we present an analysis of 624 daily surveys and 2899 self-reports from 25 individuals across five software teams in North America and Europe, collected over the course of three months. We found that developers tend to operate in fluid team constructs, which impacts team awareness and complicates gauging team productivity. We also found that perceived individual productivity most strongly predicted perceived team productivity, even more than the amount of team interactions, unplanned work, and time spent in meetings. Future research should explore how fluid team structures impact individual and organizational productivity. |
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Michael Ferber, Thorsten Hens, Finanzprofessor Thorsten Hens: «Die Devise ‹Augen zu und durch› führt bei der Geldanlage durchaus zu Erfolg», In: NZZ, 21 May 2022. (Media Coverage)

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Deborah Kalte, Political consumerism as a ‹bridge› to welfare policies, In: El Pais, p. online, 19 May 2022. (Newspaper Article)

Throughout Western societies, a growing share of citizens buy fair trade coffee, boycott certain food companies, or become vegan. These are just a few examples of the many innovative ways where citizens use their role as consumers to challenge current social, institutional, and market practices. For them, the market has become a political arena where they vote with their dollar. |
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Lorenz Honegger, Marc Chesney, An den Aktienmärkten geht die Angst um: Drei Finanzprofessoren sagen, wie sie die grössten Kurseinbrüche seit zwei Jahren einschätzen, In: NZZ, 19 May 2022. (Media Coverage)

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Konrad Staehelin, Thorsten Hens, «Der Crash radiert gerade einen grossen Teil meines Anlagevermögens aus», In: Basler Zeitung, 19 May 2022. (Media Coverage)

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Felix Kübler, Laurence Kotlikoff, Andrey Polbin, Simon Scheidegger, Can Today's and Tomorrow's World Uniformly Gain from Carbon Taxation?, In: Philadelphia Workshop on Macroeconomics & Economic Policy. 2022. (Conference Presentation)

Climate change will impact current and future generations in different regions very differently. This paper develops the first large-scale, annually calibrated, multi-region, overlapping generations model of climate change and carbon policy. It features region-specific temperature and damage functions with the phased impact of emissions on global and regional temperature calibrated to the latest scientific evidence. Absent policy, calibrated worst-case damages in the next 200 years reach and remain near 20 percent of GDP for most regions, with India, Brazil, and the South Asian Pacific suffering roughly 40 percent of GDP losses. Russia and Canada benefit somewhat from global warming. Carbon taxation, coupled with region- and generation-specific transfers, can both correct the carbon externality and raise the welfare of all current and future agents across all regions by 4.3 percent. The impact on the use and duration of fossil fuels is dramatic, as is the reduction in the path of global emissions. However, achieving completely uniform welfare gains leaves future generations in particular regions with exceptionally high net taxes. Fortunately, a carbon tax-cum redistribution policy that limits the consumption-equivalent net tax burden on any generation in any region to less than 10 percent can deliver a 4.0 percent or higher welfare gain for all peoplekind – present and future. However, carbon taxes set through time, at carbon’s marginal intertemporal social cost do far too little to mitigate climate change unless all major emitters, particularly China, adopt them and do so immediately.
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Armin Müller, Thorsten Hens, «Nachhaltig investieren sollte man nicht wegen der Rendite», In: Züricher Unterländer, 14 May 2022. (Media Coverage)

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Marc Chesney, Krieg in der Ukraine: Das Undenkbare denken?, In: Infosperber, p. online, 12 May 2022. (Newspaper Article)
 
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Steven Ongena, "Too-big-to-strand?" Bond versus bank financing in the transition to a low-carbon economy, In: CUNEF Finance Seminar. 2022. (Conference Presentation)

What is the role market- and bank-based debt play in the climate transition process? We present evidence that bond markets price the risk that assets held by fossil fuel firms strand, while banks in the syndicated loan market seemingly do not price this risk much. Consequently, to fulfill their financing needs fossil fuel firms increasingly rely less on bonds and more on loans. We can interpret the within-firm bond-to-loan substitution along stranding risk as a contraction in the supply of bond versus bank funding. Within the banking sector especially the big banks are willing to provide cheaper and more financing to fossil fuel firms |
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Anne-Barbara Luft, Thorsten Hens, Ex-Vontobel-Mann Roger Studer will Kryptoanlagen nachhaltig gestalten, In: Handelszeitung, 11 May 2022. (Media Coverage)

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Redaktion, Stefano Battiston, Les nominés des Swiss Sustainable Funds Awards 2022 sont désignés, In: Allnews, 9 May 2022. (Media Coverage)
 
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Redaktion, Stefano Battiston, Die Nominierten für die Swiss Sustainable Funds Awards 2022 stehen fest, In: Moneycab, 9 May 2022. (Media Coverage)
 
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Romana Pernisch, Daniele Dell'Aglio, Mirko Serbak, Rafael S. Gonçalves, Abraham Bernstein, Visualising the effects of ontology changes and studying their understanding with ChImp, Journal of Web Semantics, Vol. 74, 2022. (Journal Article)

Due to the Semantic Web’s decentralised nature, ontology engineers rarely know all applications that leverage their ontology. Consequently, they are unaware of the full extent of possible consequences that changes might cause to the ontology. Our goal is to lessen the gap between ontology engineers and users by investigating ontology engineers’ understanding of ontology changes’ impact at editing time. Hence, this paper introduces the Protégé plugin ChImp which we use to reach our goal. We elicited requirements for ChImp through a questionnaire with ontology engineers. We then developed ChImp according to these requirements and it displays all changes of a given session and provides selected information on said changes and their effects. For each change, it computes a number of metrics on both the ontology and its materialisation. It displays those metrics on both the originally loaded ontology at the beginning of the editing session and the current state to help ontology engineers understand the impact of their changes. We investigated the informativeness of materialisation impact measures, the meaning of severe impact, and also the usefulness of ChImp in an online user study with 36 ontology engineers. We asked the participants to solve two ontology engineering tasks – with and without ChImp (assigned in random order) – and answer in-depth questions about the applied changes as well as the materialisation impact measures. We found that ChImp increased the participants’ understanding of change effects and that they felt better informed. Answers also suggest that the proposed measures were useful and informative. We also learned that the participants consider different outcomes of changes severe, but most would define severity based on the amount of changes to the materialisation compared to its size. The participants also acknowledged the importance of quantifying the impact of changes and that the study will affect their approach of editing ontologies. |
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Steven Ongena, "Too-big-to-strand?" Bond versus bank financing in the transition to a low-carbon economy, In: Finance Seminar. 2022. (Conference Presentation)

What is the role market- and bank-based debt play in the climate transition process? We present evidence that bond markets price the risk that assets held by fossil fuel firms strand, while banks in the syndicated loan market seemingly do not price this risk much. Consequently, to fulfill their financing needs fossil fuel firms increasingly rely less on bonds and more on loans. We can interpret the within-firm bond-to-loan substitution along stranding risk as a contraction in the supply of bond versus bank funding. Within the banking sector especially the big banks are willing to provide cheaper and more financing to fossil fuel firms |
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Alexandra Stühff, Erich Walter Farkas, Ist das ESG, oder kann das weg? Die ETH, die Universität Zürich und Robeco suchen eine Antwort darauf, wie sich die Wirkung nachhaltiger Anlagen messen lässt, In: NZZ, 4 May 2022. (Media Coverage)

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Mark Martori Lopez, Machine Learning Approach for Chemical Reactions Digitalization, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2022. (Master's Thesis)
 
Automatic recognition of chemical literature facilitates expanding new areas of research, boosting the overall and detailed chemistry-related knowledge. Chemical formulas and tables, widely used in chemistry literature, can be easily extracted. Recently, machine-learning methods have successfully been applied to obtain textual representations of structure depictions of molecules. However, the successful extraction of machine-readable representation of chemical reactions from graphical depictions has not yet been demonstrated. Here we present a twofold approach based on a visual recognition system to detect high-interest elements of depictions of chemical reactions and apply various digitalisation techniques to translate the detections into machine-readable representations. We provide a Resnet50 backbone and an encoder-decoder transformer (DETR) to locate and classify graphical elements of chemical reactions such as molecules, arrows, textual information, and symbols. Given the scarcity of annotated chemical reaction depictions, we introduced a synthetic training data set with sufficient intra-variability following real-world depictions distribution. Detected elements are then combined and brought into a machine-readable format using existing tools. The open-source library Molvec translates detected depictions of molecules into machine-readable molecular representations. An Optical Character Recognition model is trained with chemical-related data to extract valuable textual information. This project aims to provide digital tools that aid in building on-demand data sets for areas with insufficient freely available chemical data. |
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