While climate change has harsh universal impacts, it is believed that its negative effects fall disproportionately on hotter, developing regions. This paper examines these claims using a panel datasets for 84 OECD and Sub- Saharan African countries between 1970–2018. I document both the evolution of country-specific temperatures and the long-term economic impact of temperature and precipitation variations on GDP per-capita. Using a panel auto-regressive distributed lag model on the sample mentioned above, I found that temperatures have unanimously increased for all sample-countries and that variations in temperature above historical norms significantly reduced income-growth. No significant relationship was found between precipitation and income growth. When interacting ‘poor’ and ‘hot’ country variables, I found that temperature variations disproportionately affected both hotter and poorer Sub-Saharan African countries. In OECD countries, temperatures have increased more quickly relative to their historical norms than Sub-Saharan African countries. Finally, while poorer and developing countries are more adversely affected by temperature variations, they seem to recover more quickly from temperature shocks than sample averages. I explain these results and link them to potential policy implications regarding global sustainable development and greenhouse gas abatement.

This study examines the potential drivers of renewable energy consumption for 22 Latin American and Caribbean countries during 2005–2014. I use the sys-GMM method to deal with the presence of endogeneity, countryspecific components and serial correlation within observations. Results confirm the dynamic behaviour of green energy consumption. Moreover, GDP per capita and CO₂ emissions per capita are the determinants of this clean energy source. The positive effect of per capita GDP implies that a non-depleting alternative source has been used to satisfy an increasing energy demand, which was experienced due to the acceleration of economic growth in the region. On the other hand, the negative effect of per capita CO₂ emissions reflects the weight that fossil fuels have in the energy mix. Because of some of the analysed countries’ oil-producer nature, oil prices rise is not enough for a switch response.

Climate change is an overarching challenge for achieving sustainable development. “Green” or “Climate” Bonds are often seen as a financial instrument that may help overcome low-carbon investment defiance. This paper explores green bonds’ potential contribution to low-carbon transition and the corporate sector’s benefit following the stock market reaction. This paper focuses on a new and fascinating subject because the green bonds market is under constant scrutiny since the emergence of the first green bond in 2007. Anticipating the significance of action towards climate change is continuously increasing over time. This project can be seen as a supporting argument for investing in green bonds and fighting against climate change. This study investigates the recent developments and challenges in the green bond market. I used matching criteria and performed multivariate OLS regression to test whether the green bond is priced differently than conventional ones. The result finds that green bonds are cheaper than conventional bonds with a 1.93–2.24 per cent premium, consistent with prior studies in this topic. I used a sample of 200 corporate green bonds issued after the Paris Agreement, i. e., from December 2015 to December 2019. I further document that the stock market reacts positively to green bonds’ announcements. For this, I performed the CAR test on a company’s stock price, which gives a statistically significant abnormal return of 0.23 per cent and 1.14 per cent over time windows 10 and 20 days, respectively. Moreover, green bonds’ environmental performance on carbon emission reduction proved to be an insignificant player. For this, I tested a relationship between green bond labels and the firms’ carbon emission. The mixed results suggest that maybe green bonds are performing well economically, but it is still far from achieving its practical goal.

Over the past 30 years, the aviation industry has seen record-breaking growth whilst enjoying exemptions from most taxes and VAT charges. Currently, the aviation sector is considered one of the fastest-growing greenhouse gas emissions sources. Attempting to reduce these emissions in a cost-effective manner, the EU decided in 2012 to include all flights entering and leaving the EU in their Emission Trading System (EU ETS). It was quickly changed to only include travel within the EU. Nevertheless, as the largest cap-and-trade system in the world, the purpose of the EU ETS is to control the growth of emissions by issuing pollution permit rights. The idea is that by setting an emission ceiling and allowing trade between sectors, emission abatement will happen where it is cheapest and easiest to do. This paper explores whether the EU ETS succeeded in reducing the aviation sector emissions over the period 2012–2018 by employing a General Synthetic Control model to estimate a counterfactual scenario. When using jet fuel consumption as a proxy for emissions, the results indicate that on average the EU ETS led to a 10 per cent increase in jet fuel consumption relative to a scenario where it was not implemented. However, the paper fails to conclude a causal relationship between EU ETS and jet fuel consumption due to drawbacks with the data. Nevertheless, it provides a starting point for future ex-post research concerned with aviation and carbon pricing in the European market.