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M. Reiner: Pricing of Climate Event Risks and Opportunities in the Options Market

December 5, 2025

This paper investigates whether climate policy event risks are priced ex ante in the options market. I show both theoretically and empirically that option prices increase with a firm’s absolute exposure to climate change, regardless of direction. I develop a model predicting a non-monotonic relationship between a firm’s exposure to a climate risk factor and its option-implied volatility difference, which compares prices of options that span a climate event with neighboring options. Using data from S&P 500 firms around the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference in Paris, I find that firms with greater absolute climate change exposure, measured by carbon emissions and textual sentiment, face significantly higher option prices before the event. I corroborate my findings using multiple events in panel regressions and a sample of European firms. Following Liu et al. (2022), I find that option-implied risk premia prior to the Paris Agreement increase significantly with firms’ climate change exposure. My results reveal that options markets anticipate potential climate policy outcomes, pricing in uncertainty regardless of whether exposure is positive or negative.

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