Career-Award for Kevin Burmester

2020-11-10 Lüneburg/Frankfurt/M. Kevin Burmester, graduate of the Leuphana University of Lüneburg, is one of the winners of the DZ Bank Group's Career Award 2020, which was awarded in October. Together with a graduate of the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, he took first place, endowed with 4,500 euros, out of 119 submitted papers in the Bachelor category. The prize was awarded for his final thesis "Understanding the dynamics of the corporate carbon-financial performance relationship - examples from Germany, France and the UK", which was supervised by Prof. Dr. Patrick Velte from the Institute of Management, Accounting & Finance at Leuphana.

Kevin Burmester's bachelor's thesis focused on the question of whether environmentally friendly business practices are economically profitable in the long term. To this end, he evaluated a sample of German HDAX (Dax30, MDax, TecDax), British (FTSE100) and French (CAC 40 and CAC 20) companies for the years 2010 - 2017. He took the data for his resulting 1,400 "firm-year" observations from the financial database of Thomson Reuters.

For his analysis Burmester examined the influence of CO2e performance on financial performance. He also investigated whether three selected influencing variables reinforce this relationship. The influencing variables are the existence of an environmental management system, the submission of a verified sustainability report and participation in the EU emissions trading scheme. In conclusion, the author found that it is financially desirable to emit less CO2e and that this effect is reinforced when companies are part of the EU emission trading scheme. Burmester's study convinced the jury because it was one of the few works that, from a market perspective, addresses sustainability issues that are new or contemporary.

Kevin Burmester studied environmental sciences and business administration at Leuphana. What he liked about his studies was that he was given a lot of freedom, for example through the 12 free modules. He also refers to the numerous student initiatives and other opportunities to live out his life outside of academic commitment. After working for PWC and BASF, Burmester is now studying for a Master's degree in Climate Change, Management & Finance at Imperial College London. Leuphana has apparently prepared him well for this: "In the first term, I was already familiar with most of the course content," says Burmester.