Voice through Divestment
22 Oct 2024
13:00 -14:15
Times are shown in local time.
Open to: All
Room W4.03 (Cambridge Judge Business School)
Trumpington St
Cambridge
CB2 1AG
United Kingdom
Join our Finance seminar, in collaboration with the Cambridge Corporate Governance Network
Speaker: Professor Marco Becht, Université Libre de Bruxelles
About the seminar topic
A common argument against divestment is that it discards voting power and has a small effect on stock prices. We argue that divestment is a statement of disapproval that aligns actions with words for effectiveness. We show that the Go Fossil Free divestment movement is a narrative with impact.
Viral divestment pledges depressed the share prices of all high carbon emitters, including those with no divestment. Peak virality coincided with a concurrent rise in the carbon premium and preceded net-zero commitments. The introduction of these commitments effectively recast divestment from a moral statement to a strategic exercise in risk management.
Speaker Bio
Marco Becht is a Professor of Finance and the Goldschmidt Professor of Corporate Governance at the Solvay Brussels School for Economics and Management at Université libre de Bruxelles where he teaches master courses on corporate governance, corporate restructuring and law, finance and economics. Becht is also a Founder Member, a Fellow and the Executive Director of the European Corporate Governance Institute, an international non-profit scientific association.
In 2003 and 2012, he was Visiting Professor and Fellow at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, in 2008 Max Schmidheiny Visiting Professor for Entrepreneurship and Risk at the University of St. Gallen, in 2011 Visiting Professor at Stanford Law School and a Visiting Fellow at the Rock Center for Corporate Governance and in 2013 a Visiting Fellow at Columbia Law School.
Register
No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Nigel Low.