Presenta: Horacio Rousseau, Florida State University, USA
Abstract solo para el mailing: Exposure to climate risks affects earnings, cash holdings, and asset prices, yet research has overlooked how peers’ knowledge shapes firms’ climate risk exposure. Combining deductive and abductive reasoning, we integrate knowledge spillover theory, absorptive capacity, and the attention-based view to examine whether and when firms benefit from green technology spillovers, defined as flows of climate-related knowledge from technologically proximate firms, to reduce climate risk. Using novel data that combine patent-based spillover estimates with climate risk exposure measures derived from text analysis of earnings calls for 7,900 firm-year observations of U.S. public firms (2002–2016), we find that green spillovers are associated with lower transition risk but not physical risk. This pattern suggests that spillovers enable green technological transformation rather than context-specific adaptation. Moreover, the spillover benefit is strongest among firms with lower (but nonzero) prior green innovation, consistent with a catch-up dynamic. Environmental salience attenuates spillover benefits, in line with the view that disaster-induced urgency crowds out the attention needed to absorb external knowledge. These findings suggest that peer technology spillovers help reduce a focal firm’s transition risk exposure under specific organizational and contextual conditions, operating differently when the absorbed knowledge reduces a shared risk rather than generates private rents.
