Ngan Luong, 2021 Finance First Class Honours Recipient

Congratulations to Ngan Luong, UTS 2021 Finance Honours graduate who has been awarded first class Honours. This is a great result for the hard work she put in throughout the year.

Ngan was also a recipient of the 2021 Refinitiv, an LSEG business Honours scholarship and she is thankful for the financial support this provided.

Ngan would like to thank her Honours mentors, Marco Navone, Kenny Phua and Jing Xu who have consistently supported and guided her throughout her Honours thesis. She would also like to thank her brother Alex Luong for providing valuable feedback and recommendations on her thesis and the unconditional support from her family and friends during this challenging academic year. Finally, she would like to thank Vitali Alexeev, the Honours co-ordinator for his support and thoughtful comments throughout the year.

Her Honours thesis was titled: “It’s on the Rise: Climate Change and CEO Compensation”

View her thesis.

This thesis examines whether climate change risk affects CEO compensation. Using a sample of U.S firms over the period of 2001-2020, she finds that CEOs of firms with higher climate change exposure earn significantly higher total pay. Using natural disasters as exogenous shocks, she shows that the uncovered effect is likely causal. CEO bargaining power plays an important role in explaining the effect. As climate change risk lowers firms’ future performance in profitability and firm value, CEOs prefer cash based compensation to equity-based compensation. Her findings suggest that there is a climate risk pay premium in CEO compensation.