Divestment from fossil fuels: Evidence from ownership data
Alain Naef  1, *@  , Benjamin Trouvé  2, *@  
1 : ESSEC Business School
ESSEC Business School
2 : Université de Nanterre
Université de Nanterre
* : Corresponding author

There is a lot of talk of fossil divestment. Is there any action? We build a new database on investor divestment based on ownership data. Instead of focusing on prices, we look at the actual ownership of investors. Our database contains 30 million investor positions in the 312 largest fossil fuel companies. We show that certain religious organizations, universities and public organizations divested from fossil fuel. When looking at all investors, we find a heterogeneous behavior between short and long-term divestment. Using a Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) and a Vector Error Correction model (VECM) both resulting from behavioral assumptions, we find that commodity price returns are the major drivers of short-term divestment and environmental and climate policy likelihood exhibit a cointegration relationship with long-term divestment. It shows that investors react strongly to market energy prices fluctuations in the short-term. Only very few investors adjust their fossil fuel holdings in the long-term, considering the risk of climate and environmental policy implementation.


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