Manuel C. Kathan

My job market paper, joint with Raphaela Roeder, Sebastian Utz and Martin Nerlinger, studies how competition affects firms’ carbon performance.

My other projects in climate finance addressed greenwashing and its relation to ESG scores, and the divergence of Implied Temperature Rise metrics. They kept raising the same question: how reliable are the metrics that climate finance builds on?

That question eventually led me to the data underneath. Many corporate emissions figures are estimates and are revised after the fact, so today’s data often differ from what investors could observe at the time. I reconstruct these histories point in time and quantify how much existing results depend on information that was not yet available.

My dissertation at the University of St. Gallen examined how leveraged buyouts affect the target’s competitors.