Manuel C. Kathan

My dissertation at the University of St. Gallen examined how leveraged buyouts affect the target’s competitors, and how much of their subsequent change in profitability and leverage reflects market repricing rather than real adjustments.

In 2022, I moved to Augsburg and turned to climate finance. My projects there addressed greenwashing and its relation to ESG scores, the divergence of Implied Temperature Rise metrics, and the effect of competition on corporate carbon performance. These projects 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. In a second line of work, I study how firms respond to carbon costs that are anticipated but not yet priced.