Mahamadi Ouoba

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Finance at the Stockholm School of Economics. My research interests include asset pricing, and Sustainable Finance. I am on the job market and available for interviews at both the EEA 2020 and the ASSA 2021 annual virtual meetings.

Job market paper: Political Sentiment and Firms' Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Engagement.

Abstract: This paper investigates how firms adjust their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) engagement in response to changes in the political environment. Using close elections at the state level as exogenous shocks to expected environmental legislation, I provide evidence that political support for pro-environmental policies positively affects firms' environmental performance, emission reduction, resource use, and environmental product innovation. To further explore the regulatory channel, I construct two novel measures of (i) state-level political support for pro-environmental policies using Congress members' and state legislators' ratings on the most important bills related to the environment, and (ii) firm-level exposure to environmental regulations using firms' 10-K filings. Furthermore, I show that firms with higher exposure to environmental regulations and lower environmental product innovation scores tend to lobby for environmental issues more but respond less to political support for pro-environmental policies.