🌐ENGLISH

We study how private information affects household responses to environmental risk. Using data from residential air quality monitors, we exploit the timing of monitor installation and high-frequency fine particulate matter (PM2.5) readings to identify responses to new information about indoor pollution risk. We find that indoor PM2.5 concentrations decline by 2.5 ug/m3 over the 12 weeks following installation, conditional on contemporaneous outdoor pollution, with effects significantly larger among households with high initial indoor pollution. The indoor–outdoor pollution gradient declines over time, indicating that households become increasingly effective at mitigating exposure when marginal health damages are highest. Using machine learning techniques to infer cooking activity and air purifier adoption, we show that households respond primarily through durable defensive investments rather than reductions in pollution-generating behavior, with back-of-the-envelope calculations implying positive net benefits. Our results suggest that personalized risk information increases the salience of indoor pollution as a controllable risk for households, in contrast to spatially coarse public information that frames pollution primarily as an outdoor threat requiring avoidance.

We test the real consequences of climate reporting harmonization. Leveraging CDP’s 2018 alignment of its questionnaire with the TCFD framework that made climate disclosures more comparable across firms and jurisdictions, we employ a difference-in-differences design comparing firms that adopted the TCFD-aligned CDP framework with contemporaneous non- adopters. Firms adopting the TCFD framework exhibit persistent and notable declines in Scope 1 and upstream Scope 3 emissions, consistent with a firm’s engagement in direct abatement in the post-adoption period rather than in indirect outsourcing in the same period. These effects are stronger where industry reporting converges and where cross-border competition heightens the value of comparability. We further provide evidence in support of an investor-driven mechanism: cross-border climate fund ownership increases from the pre- to the post-adoption period while climate-related shareholder proposals decline, consistent with improved ability of investors to allocate capital toward credible firms and reduced needs for direct monitoring via shareholder activism. Overall, the evidence suggests that a globally comparable climate disclosure framework enhances information processing and induces meaningful real reductions in corporate carbon emissions.