Measuring weather exposure with annual reports

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Nagar, Venky; Schoenfeld, Jordan
• 署名单位: University of Michigan System; University of Michigan; Utah System of Higher Education; University of Utah
• 刊物名称: REVIEW OF ACCOUNTING STUDIES
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1380-6653
• DOI: 10.1007/s11142-022-09711-2
• 发表日期: 2024
• 页码: 1-32
• 关键词: temperature shocks; Textual analysis; earnings; disclosure; liquidity; returns; RISK

摘要

The FASB and IFRS Foundation's International Sustainability Standards Board have called for measuring individual firms' exposure to weather, a fundamentally amorphous concept, as a first step toward quantifying the impact of environmental factors on financial reporting. This study builds a large-scale measure of individual firm exposure to weather using linguistic analysis of annual reports. Preliminary analyses suggest that weather is a determinant of our measure: e.g., the measure increases significantly after the firm gets hit by a severe storm. Despite being constructed from largely backward-looking mandated reports, our measure is forward looking in that it can predict variation in returns around future extreme weather events. Exposure to our measure is also priced as a risk factor, further establishing its forward-looking nature systematically in the cross-section. Our measure appears to reasonably capture a firm's business exposure to weather, thus showcasing the power of accounting to measure the economic impact of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors.