In this paper we conduct an event study to test the hypothesis that carbon management systems (CMS) are perceived by financial markets to be value-adding IS investments worth more than their costs. After populating a list of over 200 exchange-traded CMS adopters, we search newswires and specialty news outlets to identify 62 adoption announcements over a 10 year period. These are analyzed for a 3 day window starting with the announcement and we find that the mean cumulative abnormal returns (MCARs) from CMS announcements are 1.04%. A sub-analysis by firm size confirms earlier IS research results that smaller firms experience larger returns. Another sub-analysis by industry finds a potentially surprising result that lower-C02 emission industries accrue larger MCARs than high-emitting industries, though further research will be required to establish this conclusively.
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/daniel-rush/5/