Research

CCSF's research on financial inclusion explores investor motivations for social impact and de-biasing lending algorithms of microfinance lenders, while balancing social and environmental with financial objectives.

Researchers Jonathan Fu, Annette Krauss, and Mrinal Mishra partnered with Women’s World Banking and financial institutions in India, Colombia, and Mexico to conduct a technical assistance project, funded by Data.org, Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, and The Rockefeller Foundation, to audit credit portfolios for bias and develop an open-source toolkit to assess credit underwriting processes.

The CLIMAFIN Toolbox is a tool that helps integrate climate-related risks and their impact into standard financial risk measures. It provides metrics to measure these risks and impacts.

Additionally, the toolbox allows users to classify individual projects undertaken by banks, and then determine the overall contribution of the bank's portfolio to either climate adaptation or mitigation, instead of measuring the portfolio's contribution to climate vulnerability.

• CLIMAFIN Website
• Finexus

CLIMATE-FEVER is a dataset that follows the FEVER methodology and includes real-world claims related to climate change. Each claim is supported by five evidence sentences that have been manually annotated as either supporting, refuting, or lacking enough information to validate the claim.

The dataset comprises over 7,500 claim-evidence pairs and is accompanied by Climatext, which is a dataset used to detect climate change topics based on sentences.

To learn more about the project, you can visit the website of the researchers involved, including Professor Markus Leippold, Thomas Diggelmann, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Jannis Bulian, and Massimiliano Ciaramita.

• CLIMATE-FEVER
• Climatext

As of today, agencies assign environmental, social and governance (ESG) ratings to firms in order to rate the sustainability of a given firm. Despite providing vital information, the ratings between different agencies diverge substantially. The research project implemented together with MIT Sloan looks at this divergence and asks what could be done about it. For more examples of Professor Chesney’s and team’s work, have a look here.

• Aggregate Confusion

Companies often face the challenge in ensuring compliance with codes of conducts and strengthening a value-based and sustainable corporate culture. Integrity games (digital learning games that foster personal integrity) developed and empirically tested in this research project, focus on the promotion of individual competences and complement common practices aimed at the development of more rules and investments in compliance strategies. For more examples of Professor Tanner’s and team’s work, have a look here.