Kim and Lyon (2011)

Kim, Eun-Hee, and Thomas Lyon.  “When does institutional investor activism increase shareholder value? The Carbon Disclosure Project.”  The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy, 2011.

From the authors' abstract:  "This paper presents the first empirical test of the financial impacts of institutional investor activism towards climate change. Specifically, we study the conditions under which share prices are increased for the Financial Times (FT) Global 500 companies due to participation in the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a consortium of institutional investors with $57 trillion in assets. We find no systematic evidence that participation, in and of itself, increased shareholder value. However…we find that companies’ CDP participation increased shareholder value when the likelihood of climate change regulation rose… Our findings suggest that institutional investor activism towards climate change can increase shareholder value when the external business environment becomes more climate conscious."

Link:  https://ideas.repec.org/a/bpj/bejeap/v11y2011i1n50.html