Yasmine van der Straten wins best paper award at the European Sustainable Finance PhD Workshop

Ten papers from almost sixty submissions over a wide range of topics in Sustainable Finance had been selected for presentation. These topics included Social Cost of Carbon, Sustainable Investment Funds, Stranded Assets, Physical Climate Risk Assessment, Energy Ratings, Social Responsible Investing, and Climate Risk Beliefs. The program also included a keynote lecture provided by Stefano Battiston (UZH, Switzerland) on climate change and financial risks.

The best single-authored paper was awarded with a prize of €1000, which is co-sponsored by the Sustainable Finance Lab. The paper for which the prize was awarded, “Flooded House or Underwater Mortgage? The Implications of Rising Climate Risk and Adaptation on Housing, Income, and Wealth” examines the relationship between financial constraints and optimal adaptation to physical climate risk at the household level and its dynamic consequences on housing, income, and wealth. Yasmine’s paper shows that climate change is intrinsically redistributive of nature. Those with low-income are more exposed to climate risk and in the presence of binding financial constraints, these households fail to reduce vulnerability to the impacts of physical risk, which exacerbates wealth inequality and leads to an excess reduction in liveable land, ultimately reducing the welfare of future generations. As low-income households become more constrained as the impacts of climate change intensify, the adaptation gap widens over time.

Yasmine is a second year PhD Candidate in Finance at the University of Amsterdam and Tinbergen Institute under the supervision of research fellows Enrico Perotti and Rick van der Ploeg. Her research is in climate finance and focuses on understanding the effects of financial frictions on effective strategies for addressing climate change. She graduated from Tinbergen Institute’s research master in 2021.