Patrick O'Connell, CFA
12 Years at AB|14 Years of Experience
Patrick O’Connell is a Senior Vice President and Director of Responsible Investing Portfolio Solutions and Research for public markets. In this role, he develops strategies and tools that help integrate ESG considerations into the teams’ research, engagement and investment processes across AB’s Equities and Fixed Income businesses. From 2021 to 2024, O’Connell served as director of Fixed Income Responsible Investing Research. Earlier in his career, he served as a corporate credit research analyst, focusing on emerging-market corporates in Latin American and African countries. O’Connell joined the Emerging Markets research team in 2013 after working as a credit analyst covering US high-yield energy credits at AB. Prior to joining the firm in 2012, he was a desk analyst at UBS Investment Bank, where he helped allocate capital on the trading desk. O’Connell holds a BS in accounting and finance (magna cum laude) from Villanova University and is a CFA charterholder. Location: New York
Published Work
Natural language processing can give investment managers an early warning about negative ESG news.
Will outcome bonds deliver on their promises? A systematic approach helps investors decide.
Integrating the physical toll of climate change helps investors spot key risks—and opportunities
A new approach to ESG research could ease investors’ frustrations with sourcing and evaluating data.
Investors face an urgent challenge in understanding, analyzing and managing biodiversity risks.
Sovereign debt-for-nature swaps are a specialized ESG-labeled structure with a familiar feature: some issuers have strong credentials—others less so.
Biodiversity is gaining prominence as a potentially material issue for companies and investors around the world.
Investors need to understand the potential physical damage from natural hazards before they can assess their financial implications.
Just six metrics can effectively assess sovereign issuers’ sustainability and provide guidance for both issuers and investors.
Progress toward a sustainable world would be hamstrung without the backing of global banks and their sponsorship of green and sustainable bonds.
The latest entry in the ESG-labeled bond arena has solid potential but a few kinks, too.
The extent to which issuers prevent carbon emissions can be a key selection factor in corporate bond investing.
With so many green bonds outstanding now, investors need more insight to differentiate among them and understand their performance characteristics.
A systematic framework can help investors avoid surprises-and set a gold standard for ESG issuance.
Robust ESG research can alert investors to major risks, sometimes months or years before bad news hits the market.
ESG research insights are critical to avoiding risks and unearthing opportunities among emerging-market corporate bonds. Chile's utility sector helps us explain.
More ESG-labeled bonds are being issued than ever before. But to fund a genuinely green future, investors must separate the grain from the chaff.
Fixed-income investors should include governance reviews in their investment process. Here's why.
We debunk the environmental, social and governance myths standing between investors and EM corporate-bond investing.
Switching to electric has huge implications for vehicle assemblers, component manufacturers, extractive industries-and responsible investors.
Most investors need little persuading that emerging markets offer exciting opportunities. But emerging-market corporates also pose environmental, social and governance (ESG) challenges so entangled and seemingly intractable that investors are reminded of the legendary Gordian knot. In this paper, we show investors how to cut through these challenges.