UZH Candoc Grant 2026

The University of Zurich supports outstanding early-career doctoral researchers through its UZH Candoc Grants, which provide protected research time to advance excellent PhD projects.

Congratulation toTobias Schimanski and Ognjen Stankovic from our department on being awarded UZH Candoc Grants 2026!

Tobias develops a method that identifies climate change adaptation actions and solutions of firms. Using a Large Language Model-based classification system, he measures firm's climate adaptation actions in the subcategories physical protection, adaptive operations, risk transfer, financial reserves, and risk assessment. The dataset spans over 13,500 public US firms from 2003 to 2025. Using a difference-in-difference design around extreme weather events, he shows that targeted pre-event adaptation helps to mitigate negative stock market impacts. Assessing firm heterogeneity, he finds that financially constrained firms do not benefit from pre-event adaptation. These firms show weaker baseline levels of adaptation and post-event adaptation responses, raising questions about their role in increasing systemic risk due to physical climate events. Data and models are available on https://huggingface.co/climate-adaptation. 

Working paper: Schimanski, Tobias, Firm-level Climate Change Adaptation (April 05, 2026). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6710044 

Currencies of advanced economies exhibit large systematic differences in average excess returns: economies exporting sophisticated, differentiated exports - Japan and Switzerland - appreciate in global downturns and earn low risk premia, while commodity exporters - Australia and New Zealand - depreciate and yield high premia. We develop a two-country general-equilibrium asset-pricing model in which good demand curvature, endogenous market power, sticky wages in the sophisticated sector, and incomplete asset markets shape exchange-rate dynamics. The model rationalizes the differentiated versus undifferentiated-exporter pattern in G10 currency risk premia along with terms-of-trade volatility, pricing-to-market, and UIP deviations. Crucially, the model generates a currency premium of empirical magnitude (≈ 2.8%/yr) with similarly volatile consumption across countries. The premium comes from cyclicality of the real exchange rate rather than of a consumption-risk difference, consistent with the data, in which consumption volatility does not line up with currency premia.

Working paper: Stankovic, Ognjen and Zemlicka, Jan, Market Power, Export Sophistication, and Currency Risk Premia (May 2026), forthcoming