Tuning into Climate Risks: Extracting Innovation from TV News for Clean Energy Firms

Abstract

This article develops multiple novel climate risk measures (or variables) based on the television news coverage by Bloomberg, CNBC, and Fox Business, and examines how they affect the systematic and idiosyncratic risks of clean energy firms in the United States (US). The measures are built on climate related keywords and cover the volume of coverage, type of coverage (climate crisis, renewable energy, and government and human initiatives), and media sentiments. We show that an increase in the aggregate measure of climate risk, as indicated by coverage volume, reduces idiosyncratic risk while increasing systematic risk. When climate risk is segregated, we find that systematic risk is positively affected by the \textit{physical risk} of climate crises and \textit{transition risk} from government and human initiatives, but no such impact is evident for idiosyncratic risk. Additionally, we observe an asymmetry in risk behavior: negative sentiments tend to increase idiosyncratic risk and decrease systematic risk, while positive sentiments have no significant impact. This asymmetry persists even when considering print media variables, climate policy uncertainty, and analysis based on the COVID-19 period.