On March 13, 2025, at 5:00 PM, the next webinar in the Inspirational Lectures series, “Unleash the Power of Words in Finance,” will be held, led by Prof. James Thewissen – UCLouvain | BMI Executive Institute.
About the lecture:
This lecture tackles the important topic of corporate sustainability reporting and sits at the crossroads of sustainable finance and artificial intelligence. We will discuss how the content of ESG reports shapes investor perceptions and reduces information asymmetry. Based on the sentLDA method, a sentence-based topic modeling algorithm, we will analyze 1,667 ESG reports between 2007 and 2020 to uncover 30 key themes that drive investors’ interest.
Prof.dr. James Thewissen is Associate Professor (Tenured) of Corporate Finance at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain), Belgium and Vice-Dean of External Corporate Relations and Communication at the Louvain School of Management. His research interests include corporate finance, sentiment analytics, sustainable finance, econometric modelling, machine learning and international finance. In particular, he researches on the development of machine learning methods to optimize the extraction of information from unstructured data contained in corporate disclosures, such as annual reports, audit reports, earnings press releases and CEO letters to shareholders.
