Climate Sentiment and Green Stocks Returns: empirical evidence from European and American markets

The work analyzed evidence on financial markets performance in relation to climate change concerns. European markets are the primary focus of the analysis, given the prominent ESG disclosure practices and regulatory concerns on climate issues in the region, but data for US firms is also analyzed. The main questions that are explored regard Investors' preferences, as proxied by their sentiment, and firms' environmental impact. I adopted sentiment analysis techinques to extract and quantify relevant data from qualitative sources. The resulting indicator was integrated with conventional financial metrics into econometric models to test theoretical predictions of the literature. In particular, I investigated whether stock performance is influenced by firm's environmental impact when there are different levels of climate change sentiment.