Scientists often describe climate change with superlatives. Urgent. Dire. Existential. The superlatives are all bad. Encouragingly, financial economists are devoting more and more attention to the intersection of climate and finance. Since time is short to define research agendas that help us manage the emerging financial and economic risks from climate change, we surveyed a number of finance experts and professionals to find the areas of agreement and coordinate on promising directions. Our full working paper, to be published in the November issue of the Journal of Financial Economics, may be found here.

Specifically, to reach academics, we collected 3,570 email addresses of professors of the top 100 finance departments. To reach practitioners, we used an email address list of 6,921 NYU Stern graduates working in finance. To reach those involved in policy, we identified 17 relevant public-sector institutions, such as the Federal Reserve Banks, the Bank of England, and the International Monetary Fund, and collected 955 emails of researchers or policymakers in their finance-related groups. Despite receiving only a single, unsolicited recruitment email with a link to our online survey, we received 861 complete responses—453 faculty, 294 practitioners, and 72 financial regulators—for a response rate of 7.5%, which compares well to the response rates typical of this sort of survey.

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