Tobi Oladiran
Research areas: Sustainable Finance, Corporate Finance, Asset Pricing, Development Finance.
I study how investors and capital markets shape the green transition, and who captures the returns from investing in nature and health.
My postdoctoral advisors are Stefano Giglio and Eli Fenichel at Yale.
My Ph.D. committee members were Denitsa Stefanova, Roman Kräussl, Michael Halling, Eric Nowak, and Stefano Giglio.
I received my Ph.D. in Finance from the University of Luxembourg in 2025 (Excellent Thesis Award) and visited the Yale School of Management during my doctorate. I hold master’s degrees from the University of Luxembourg and Higher School of Economics (HSE), am a chartered accountant (ACCA & ICAN), and founded SustainaFinance, a free financial database for Africa.
Corporate Carbon Divestitures and Green Reinvestment: The Role of Capital Reallocation and Investor Engagement [Draft]
Updated: 03 November, 2026
A central concern in the corporate green transition is asset reshuffling: carbon-intensive public firms may sell “dirty” assets to private owners, reducing their reported carbon exposure without reducing emissions from the transferred assets. This paper examines whether divesting firms subsequently reallocate capital toward green productive capacity. Using plant-level data and patent-level measures of green innovation, I find that firms exiting brown generation expand green physical assets, primarily through greenfield construction, but do not increase green patenting. Exploiting the rule-based construction of the Climate Action 100+ Focus List, I show that investor engagement shifts corporate investment away from brown and toward green capacity. Finally, I combine seller reallocation, buyer investment, plant operation, and retirement responses in a counterfactual emissions-accounting framework. The environmental consequences of divestiture depend not only on the ownership and operation of transferred assets, but also on the subsequent investment decisions of sellers and buyers.
- Presented at: Yale Environmental Economics Seminar, Yale School of the Environment, 2026; Yale Finance Lunch Seminar, Yale School of Management, 2026
ESG Policy Uncertainty, with Roman Kräussl & Denitsa Stefanova [Draft]
We examine whether the uncertainty related to developments in ESG regulation is reflected in asset prices. We proxy the sensitivity of firms to ESG regulation uncertainty by the disparity between the components of their ESG ratings. Firms with high ESG disparity have a higher option-implied cost of protection against downside tail risk. The impact of the misalignment across the dimensions of the ESG score is distinct from that of the level of the ESG score itself.
- Presented at: 6th GRASFI Annual Conference (Yale University) 2023; Liechtenstein Workshop on Sustainable Finance 2023; 5th JRC Summer School on Sustainable Finance 2023; 12th Portuguese Finance Network Conference 2023; European Financial Management Association Annual Meeting 2023; 39th Conference of the French Finance Association (AFFI) 2023
- Award: VP Bank Best Paper Award, Liechtenstein Workshop on Sustainable Finance 2023
Do Firms Benefit from Public Health Interventions? Evidence from Malaria Control in Sub-Saharan Africa, with Tania Diaz-Bazan, Eli Fenichel & Stefano Giglio [Draft]
We study donor-financed malaria interventions in sub-Saharan Africa, exploiting year-to-year variation in global funding interacted with regions’ pre-program malaria burden. A ten-percentage-point increase in insecticide-treated-net coverage lowers the malaria parasite rate by about nine percentage points, and a ten-percentage-point reduction in malaria prevalence raises maize and commercial-scale mining output by roughly thirty percent. We propose a public–private financing architecture in which firms contribute in proportion to the benefits they capture.
A Review on ESG Investing: Investors’ Expectations, Beliefs and Perceptions, with Roman Kräussl & Denitsa Stefanova [Journal]
Journal of Economic Surveys, 2024, 38(2), 476–502
- Award: Top Cited Article 2024, Journal of Economic Surveys
A free financial database for researchers and students in Africa, built to give those without access to commercial data the inputs needed for empirical finance research.
A network of scientists and practitioners from Yale, the Smithsonian, The Nature Conservancy, the African Development Bank, IFAD, and UNEP, promoting investment that jointly improves health and nature.