As part of the Brown Bag Lunch series, the International Economics Department at the Graduate Institute is pleased to invite you to a public talk given by Laura Nowzohour, PhD student in International Economics. She will present her research, coauthored with Joelle Noailly and Matthias van den Heuvel work, entitled:

Heard the News? Environmental Policy and Investments in Clean Technologies

Abstract: This article aims to construct various novel newspaper-based indexes of US environmental policy and to examine how they relate to investments in clean technologies. Extracting text from ten leading US newspapers over the last three decades, we use text-mining algorithms to build 1) a general index of US environmental policy history, 2) topic-specific components of environmental and climate regulations and 3) a measure of environmental policy uncertainty. We verify the added-value of these indexes by examining whether they capture meaningful policy shocks and how they correlate and help to forecast proxies for investments in clean technologies, such as venture capital and clean energy stock data. Our study shows that a lot of substantial information on environmental policy can be extracted from newspaper articles, providing promising avenues for future research.