Sustainable Finance

Summary

The Sustainable Finance course is an interdisciplinary program designed for masters' students seeking to understands - on one hand - how climate change and sustainability are reshaping financial markets, and - on the other - how financial markets can be leveraged to address the climate challenge.

Content

Keywords

• Public Goods Economics

• Climate Risk

• Corporate Disclosures

• Climate-related Financial Risk

• Asset Pricing

• Sustainable Investing

• Impact Investing

• Green Bonds

• Incentive Design

• Financial Regulation

• Climate Policy

• Insurance Markets

• ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance)
• Transition Finance
• AI and Sustainability

Learning Prerequisites

Required courses

Students should have prior exposure to asset pricing and corporate finance, and be comfortable engaging with quantitative material. Basic experience in programming (e.g., Python, R, or C++) is recommended, particularly for working with data-driven examples and models.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course, the student must be able to:

• Analyze
• Apply
• Elaborate
• Estimate

Transversal skills

• Evaluate one's own performance in the team, receive and respond appropriately to feedback.
• Communicate effectively, being understood, including across different languages and cultures.
• Take account of the social and human dimensions of the engineering profession.
• Demonstrate the capacity for critical thinking
• Summarize an article or a technical report.
• Write a literature review which assesses the state of the art.

Teaching methods

slides

reading list

guest speakers

problem sets

Expected student activities

1 to 2 problem sets (approx group of 4 students, depending on capacity)

Assessment methods

problem sets (30 % of the final grade)

written exam (70 % of the final grade)

Supervision

Resources

Moodle Link

• https://go.epfl.ch/FIN-400