Best Working Paper Award 2025

Winners

Hong Kong – 17 January 2025 | The HKU Jockey Club Enterprise Sustainability Global Research Institute is delighted to announce two Winners and two Honorable Mentions of our Working Paper Award 2025. The winners are selected from our working paper series published in 2023 and 2024, and each best paper winner would be awarded a prize of US$4,000.

The prize was awarded at the ‘2025 Inaugural ASU-HKU Interdisciplinary Conference‘ in Hong Kong on 17 January 2025.

Congratulations to Xinming Du (National University of Singapore), Lei Li (The University of Göttingen), and Eric Zou (University of Michigan) for their paper: “Trade, Trees, and Lives”  (link to the full paper).

- This study delves into the hidden costs of Brazil’s agricultural export boom, focusing on its profound impact on both the environment and public health.

Congratulations to Franklin Allen (Imperial College London), Adelina Barbalau (University of Alberta), and Federica Zeni (The World Bank) for their paper: “Reducing Carbon Using Regulatory and Financial Market Tools” (link to the full paper).

- This study offers a consolidated theoretical framework that explores the interaction between two key mechanisms for reducing carbon emissions: regulatory tools like carbon taxes and financial market tools such as sustainability-linked loans and bonds.

🏆 "Trade, Trees, and Lives"

Xinming Du | Lei Li | Eric Zou

Xinming Du

Assistant Professor
Department of Economics

National University

of Singapore

Lei Li

Professor of Economics and Politics of China
Faculty of Business

and Economics

University of Göttingen

Eric Zou

Assistant Professor
Business Economics

and Public Policy
University of Michigan

🏆 "Reducing Carbon using Regulatory and Financial Market Tools"

Franklin Allen | Adelina Barbalau | Federica Zeni

Franklin Allen

Professor of Finance

and Economics

Brevan Howard Centre

Imperial College London

Adelina Barbalau

Assistant Professor of Finance

Alberta School of Business

University of Alberta

Federica Zeni

Economist

Development Research Group

World Bank

Honorable Mentions

We would like to commerate Gino Cenedese (Fulcrum Asset Management), Shangqi Han (Fulcrum Asset Management), and Marcin Kacperczyk (lmperial College London), for their work: “Carbon-Transition Risk and Net-Zero Portfolios” (link to the full paper).

- Their paper examines how net-zero portfolios can drive corporate decarbonization. It introduces the distance to exit (DTE) metric, helping investors assess exclusion risk and encouraging companies to speed up decarbonization.

We would also like to mention Alex Edmans (London Business School), Tom Gosling (London Business School), and Dirk Jenter (London School of Economics and Political Science), for their study: “Sustainable Investing: Evidence from the Field” (link to the full paper)!

- Their paper surveyed over 500 active equity portfolio managers across both traditional and sustainable funds, exploring whether, why, and how these managers incorporate firms’ environmental and social performance into their investment decisions.