Immigrant Entrepreneurship and Legislator Attention: Field Experiment
Prof. Hao LIANG
Ho Bee Professorship in Sustainability Management and Associate Professor of Finance at Singapore Management University (SMU)
Date: 10 December 2025 (Wednesday)
Time: 10:00-11:30
Venue: E22-G015
Host: Prof. Rubin HAO, Assistant Professor in Accounting
Abstract
This talk examines how financial markets can value nature-related risks by linking biodiversity impact to transition risk. I first distinguish between physical risks arising from ecosystem degradation and transition risks stemming from evolving policies, regulation, and market expectations in the move toward a nature-positive economy, highlighting why biodiversity loss remains less well priced than climate risk despite its comparable economic materiality. Building on this framework, I present two complementary studies. The first, “Nature Transition Risk,” exploits the Kunming UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) as a policy shock signaling strengthened political commitment to conservation in China. Using an event-study design for Chinese A-share firms and a novel machine-learning measure of firm-level exposure to nature-related subsidies, the study finds negative abnormal returns around COP15, with larger declines for firms receiving more nature-related subsidies, facing higher earnings volatility, and operating in fiscally constrained, conservation-pressured regions. These patterns suggest that investors primarily price policy uncertainty and mandated conservation effort rather than expected conservation rents. The second study, based on firm- and portfolio-level biodiversity footprinting and monetisation exercises for an international agri-food company and a large global equity portfolio, shows how biodiversity loss—largely generated in value chains and concentrated in a few holdings—can be quantified at the business level and translated into an annual monetary impact that is material relative to financial returns. Integrating these lenses, the seminar argues that biodiversity impact provides a tractable anchor for valuing nature transition risks and for aligning corporate and investor decisions with emerging nature-related disclosure and stewardship agendas.
Speaker
Dr. Hao Liang is Ho Bee Professorship in Sustainability Management and Associate Professor of Finance at Singapore Management University (SMU), where he also serves as the Academic Director of the Singapore Green Finance Centre (Singapore’s first centre of excellence for sustainable finance) and the Co-Lead of the Sustainable Business Research Peak. Previously he held the BNP Paribas Fellowship, DBS Sustainability Fellowship, and Lee Kong Chian Fellowship. Dr. Liang’s research interests include sustainable finance, impact investing, corporate finance, and governance. He has published in prestigious academic journals, such as the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Finance, Journal of International Business Studies, Management Science, Organization Science, Journal of Business Venturing, and Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences. He is the Section Editor (Finance & Business Ethics) for the Journal of Business Ethics, an Associate Editor for Management Science, Journal of Business Research, Asia-Pacific Journal of Financial Studies, and British Accounting Review, and serves on the editorial review board of the Strategic Management Journal.
All are welcome!
