Igor Kadach

IESE Business School

Third-Party Provision of Carbon Emission Data and ESG Ratings: Evidence from Climate TRACE

Tuesday, September 8, 2026 – 01:45 – 03:15 PM (CEST)

Please note the deviation from the regular Monday schedule. The session will take place in room O 226/28 (i.e., room 226/28 on level 2 of the east wing of the castle). This session will be held as a hybrid event. The Zoom link for the event can be found here.

Seminar Abstract
ESG ratings are playing an increasingly important role in investment decisions, yet concerns persist regarding their quality and consistency. This paper examines whether the introduction of third-party environmental data affects ESG ratings. We leverage the first public release of facility-level emissions data from Climate TRACE (CT), an independent non-profit organization, as a plausibly exogenous shock to the amount of independent and standardized emissions data available to ESG rating agencies. We find that ESG rating agencies assign higher assessed ESG risk to firms covered by CT, consistent with agencies incorporating CT data as an incremental input into their assessment models. Moreover, CT coverage is associated with higher predictive power and stronger capital-market implications of ESG ratings, as well as reduced rating divergence across rating agencies. Overall, our findings suggest that independent, standardized data inputs can enhance the informativeness and alignment of ESG ratings.

Speaker Bio
Igor Kadach is Associate Professor in the Accounting and Control Department. He holds a Ph.D. in Accounting from the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University (NYU), an M.A. in Economics from the New Economic School and a B.A. in Economics from Moscow State University.

Associate Professor Kadach’s research interests concentrate on voluntary disclosure, institutional ownership and the structure of executive compensation. In his dissertation, he studied the interplay of equity mispricing and managers’ earnings forecast decisions.

In future research, he plans to study the effects of institutional ownership and executive compensation on managers’ disclosure decisions.

Admission information
The seminar is open to the public. To receive invitations for upcoming seminar talks, please sign up for the mailing list via this form.