Portfolio holdings of pro-social retail investors

Maximilian Rohrer

Abstract

This project studies the portfolio holdings of pro-social/green retail investors. We use comprehensive administrative data on public stock holdings of all Norwegian individual investors from 2002 to 2018. Pro-social/green investors are identified by participation on boards of non-profit organisations. The projects aims at answering following questions: (1) Do pro-social/green retail investors hold portfolios that have higher ESG activities/scores. (2) Are portfolios of green investors a hedge against climate change? (3) Do green/pro-social investors divest from firms engaging in bad ESG behaviour? (4) Does the investment behaviour of green investors change in response to climate change news and the onset of the ESG fund industry? The empirical evidence hopes to inform about how to theoretically model green/pro-social investors.

As urbanization increases, municipalities across the world have become aware of the negative impacts of road-based transportation, which include traffic congestion and air pollution. As a result, several cities have introduced tolling schemes to discourage vehicles from entering the inner city. However, little research has been done to examine the impact of tolling schemes on the routing of commercial fleets, especially on the resulting costs and emissions. In this study, we investigate a vehicle routing problem considering different congestion charge schemes for several city types. We design comprehensive computational experiments to investigate whether different types of tolling schemes work in the way municipalities expect and what factors affect the performance of the congestion charge schemes. We compare the impact on a company’s total costs, fuel usage (which drives emissions), and delivery tour plans. Our experimental results demonstrate that some congestion pricing schemes may even increase the emi