Research Fellow David Ardia to pursue groundbreaking work on media, climate and finance

The Institute for Sustainable Finance (ISF) is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. David Ardia, Professor of Finance at HEC Montréal, as an ISF Research Fellow. Dr. Ardia’s fellowship will support his groundbreaking work with the Media Climate Change Concerns (MCCC) index.

The index was developed by Dr. Ardia together with Kris Boudt, Keven Bluteau and Koen Inghelbrecht and introduced in their 2023 Management Science article, “Climate Change Concerns and the Performance of Green versus Brown Stocks.” It is a daily, news-based index designed to capture changes in public concern about climate change. Its transparent methodology makes it possible to track how climate concerns evolve over time and to study their relationship with financial markets.

The original research demonstrates the importance of these changing concerns for asset prices. In particular, shifts in climate change concerns can affect the relative performance of environmentally friendly (“green”) and carbon-intensive (“brown”) companies, highlighting an important channel through which climate-related risks can be reflected in financial markets.

Since its introduction, the MCCC index has been used in academic research and practitioner applications as a measure of climate-related financial risk. Maintaining such an indicator, however, requires continuously processing new information and ensuring that the index remains regularly updated and publicly accessible.

Support from ISF will help ensure the continuity of the MCCC index. A central objective of the project is to establish a sustainable process for regularly updating and publicly releasing the index, together with the documentation needed for researchers and practitioners to use it.

“The value of an index like the MCCC increases when it can be maintained over time. With the support of the Institute for Sustainable Finance, we will be able to continue updating the index and make it available to researchers, investors and policymakers interested in monitoring climate-related concerns and their financial implications,” said Dr. Ardia.

The project will also extend this research agenda beyond environmental issues. A complementary Human Capital Concerns (HCC) index is being developed to measure media-driven public concern about labour practices, workforce management and broader social issues.

Together, these initiatives seek to provide transparent and reproducible measures of evolving environmental and social concerns, while strengthening the connection between academic research and practical applications in sustainable finance.

“By supporting the MCCC index, ISF is helping turn an academic research output into a lasting resource for researchers, investors and policy makers,” said ISF Director Maya Saryyeva. “We are very excited to have David Ardia join our esteemed group of Research Fellows to continue this important work.”