Attentive to carbon risk? An analysis of stock market reactions to the Paris agreement and US politics

Verfasserin: Stefan Fasching
Studiengang: Banking and Finance
Fachbereich: Finance
Betreuer: Thomas Gehrig

Abstract:
The goal of this master thesis is to analyze, if the Paris Climate Agreement had a lasting effect on investor’s risk perception with respect to carbon risk. Throughout this study empirical data from 5 green and 4 brown indices along with 3 market indices was investigated, with the observation window ranging from 30.12.1999 until 28.2.2022. In order to evaluate any lasting effects, the empirical analysis was conducted for the event of the signing of the Paris Agreement as well as the withdrawal from said treaty by the United States of America. Three different analytical methods were employed as to provide different angled solutions to the research question and to set the obtained results in relation to previous studies. The findings suggest that the Paris Agreement had no lasting effect on investor’s risk perception.

Das sagt der Verfasser:

"Ich habe dieses Thema gewählt, da es eines der gesellschaftlichen Probleme dieser Zeit mit den aktuellsten Entwicklungen in der Finanzindustrie verknüpft. Zusätzlich steckt dieses Forschungsgebiet noch in den Kinderschuhen und bietet daher die Möglichkeit zahlreichen noch wenig erforschten Phänomenen auf den Grund zu gehen." - Stefan Fasching

 The impact of slot choice behavior on operational efficiency and environmental sustainability

Verfasserin: Rebecca Gabel
Studiengang: Internationale Betriebswirtschaft
Fachbereich: Business Analytics
Betreuer: Jan Fabian Ehmke

Abstract:
Logistics service providers are under high pressure to improve the sustainability of their transport activities by including the environmental impact in their cost evaluation, whilst maintaining a high level of operational efficiency in order to remain profitable. Especially against the background of the remarkable growth of the e-commerce economy, carefully considering how to approach this challenge has become more important than ever. Especially the e-grocery business has experienced enormous growth rates, as it is time-saving for customers to have groceries delivered directly to their homes and enables them to maintain social distance in times of the pandemic. These trends not only created increased sales opportunities, but also massive logistical challenges. In the realm of last-mile operations, especially attended home deliveries, which require the presence of the customer during delivery, bear the risk that delivery vehicles have to visit a similar location several times a day to serve customers within different delivery time windows. Such challenges related to attended home deliveries on the one hand significantly jeopardize a company’s operational efficiency through high expenses in lost productivity and fuel waste, and on the other hand strongly impede the achievement of environmental sustainability objectives. Although logistics service providers are increasingly responding to these issues by optimizing their supply-side processes, the potential that can be unlocked from influencing demand as means to improve system performance has long been overlooked. In this context, especially the possibility of using non-financial incentives to motivate customers to choose delivery time windows that allow for both efficient and environmentally friendly route plans has been insufficiently studied. This paper aims to close this gap. To scrutinize the impact of slot choice behavior on operational efficiency and environmental sustainability in the context of attended home delivery, a last-mile vehicle routing problem is simulated. Because transportation still relies nearly entirely on mineral oil products, carbon dioxide emissions are a direct reflection of fossil energy consumption and are thus used to assess the sustainability dimension of last-mile delivery operations. As e-groceries typically require the presence of the customer upon delivery, this paper uses the time-window based delivery of groceries as an example for attended home delivery. For this purpose, three different scenarios are considered. In the first scenario, route plans for 20 customers with known locations and time window preferences are created. In doing so, the aim is to investigate how the operational efficiency and the expected level of CO2 emissions of delivery routes change with increased time window length. In the second scenario, a closer look is taken at the impact of an individual customer’s time window choice on the operational efficiency and environmental sustainability of the last-mile delivery route. Finally, a fully dynamic vehicle routing problem is imitated in the last part of the simulation. Thereby, the time window leading to minimum additional CO2 emissions is determined incrementally and marked as environmentally friendly to each customer within a given route plan.

Das sagt die Verfasserin:

"Gewählt habe ich das Thema, um darauf aufmerksam zu machen, dass selbst scheinbar unwesentliche und alltägliche Entscheidungen, wie die Wahl von Zeitfenstern bei Hauszustellungen von Lebensmitteln, sich stark auf die Nachhaltigkeit von Lieferrouten auswirken können.

Zudem wollte ich durch meine Arbeit hervorheben, wie wichtig es ist, dass Kunden durch Unterstützung von Logistik-Dienstleistern ein klareres Bild über die umweltbezogenen Auswirkungen ihrer Entscheidungen erhalten, um somit ihr Verhalten leichter in Richtung mehr Nachhaltigkeit ändern zu können." - Rebecca Gabel