Department of Banking and Financial Management  University of Piraeus

Academic Seminar Series

Thursday, May 18^th, 2023 / Time: 16:15 – 17:30, Online

Emirhan İlhan

National University of Singapore Business School

Abstract

Many households face uninsurable background risks due to future sea level rise (SLR). Using detailed local variation in SLR exposure and disaggregated geographic information on households in the United States, I show that SLR exposed households participate less in the stock market compared to their unexposed counterparts within the same neighborhood. This effect is driven by long-run SLR risks as opposed to short-run flood risks and is elevated at times when attention to climate change is high. I provide causal evidence of the effect of SLR risks on household portfolio choices by exploiting plausibly exogenous variation stemming from the adoption of state-led climate change adaptation plans that reduced households’ SLR risks. Additional tests isolate the effect of SLR exposure as a background risk from alternative explanations, including changes in house prices, past flooding experiences, endogenous location choices, political beliefs, or differences in risk preferences.

Emirhan İlhan is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Business School and a Research Affiliate at the NUS Sustainable and Green Finance Institute (SGFIN). His research interests lie in climate finance, with applications in household finance, corporate finance, and asset pricing. His research was in Review of Financial Studies and he has presented at conferences such as the American Finance Association, Western Finance Association, and European Finance Association. Emirhan earned a Ph.D. in Finance from the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management in 2022. Prior to his Ph.D., he studied in the Erasmus Mundus Computer Simulations in Science and Engineering (COSSE) double degree program at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands, specializing in applied mathematics and computational finance. He obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Middle East Technical University in Turkey, specializing in computational fluid dynamics. https://emirhanilhan.github.io/

This seminar will be online on Teams. Click here to attend