Corporate Carbon Emissions Equated to 44 Percent of Profits
Facing greater scrutiny, will companies cut emissions—either voluntarily or with some peer pressure?
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Biography
Christian Leuz is the Charles F. Pohl Distinguished Service Professor of Accounting and Finance at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research and Leibniz Institute SAFE, EPIC Scholar, a Fellow at the European Corporate Governance Institute, Goethe Universität Frankfurt’s Center for Financial Studies, and of the European Economic Experts Panel. He studies global capital markets, in particular, the role of disclosure, transparency, and sustainability reporting; the economic effects of financial and bank regulation; international accounting; governance and corporate finance. His work has been published in many top academic journals including Science, Journal of Finance, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Accounting & Economics, and Review of Financial Studies. He has received several awards and honors, including the Chicago Booth Class of 2023 Phoenix Award, the 2022 ACA Prize in Financial Governance, the 2016 and the 2014 Distinguished Contribution to the Accounting Literature Awards, and a Humboldt Research Award in 2012. He was also a winner in Social Sciences and Humanities in the Falling Walls Foundation Global Call 2024. He is recognized as a “Highly Cited Researcher” by Thomson Reuters and was included in their list of “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” five years in a row (from 2014 to 2018). Professor Leuz was a senior editor for the Journal of Accounting Research and has served on many editorial boards, including the Journal of Accounting & Economics, The Accounting Review, the Journal of Business, Finance and Accounting, and the Review of Accounting Studies.
Born in Germany, Professor Leuz earned his doctoral degree and Habilitation at the Goethe University Frankfurt. In 2024, he received an honorary doctorate (Dr. h.c.) from Maastricht University. Prior to his position at Chicago Booth, he was the Harold Stott Term Assistant Professor in Accounting at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Research Interests
Corporate disclosure and financial reporting in capital and other settings and markets; transparency regulation; corporate governance; financial markets and corporate finance; cost of capital; international accounting; securities regulation; ESG and sustainability reporting.
Academic Areas
- Accounting
Selected Publications
"Reporting Regulation and Corporate Innovation," with Matthias Breuer and Steven Vanhaverbeke, Journal of Accounting and Economics, forthcoming.
"Who Falls Prey to the Wolf of Wall Street? Investor Participation in Market Manipulation," with Steffen Meyer, Maximilian Muhn, Eugene Soltes, and Andreas Hackethal, Management Science, forthcoming.
"The Death of a Regulator: Strict Supervision, Bank Lending and Business Activity," with Joao Granja, Journal of Financial Economics,158 (2024), 103871.
"Mandatory Disclosure Would Reveal Corporate Carbon Damages," with Michael Greenstone and Patricia Breuer, Science, 381 (2023), 837-840.
For a listing of research publications, please visit the university library listing page.
Working Papers
2025 - 2026 Course Schedule
Get Insights from Christian Leuz in Chicago Booth Review
Does Tackling Global Warming Require Global Reporting Rules?
Chicago Booth’s Christian Leuz discusses an international framework for carbon reporting.
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Could Reporting Carbon Emissions Help Cut Them?
Chicago Booth’s Christian Leuz explains how transparency can help fight environmental damage.
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