You may want to look into Richard Swinburne's bibliography. Not sure if he ever provides as thematic a treatment as you'd like, and I haven't read him closely since I was an undergrad several years back, but he subscribes to a "powers/liabilities" account of the causal capacity of substances and defines an "event" simply in terms of "the instantiation of properties by a substance;" I'm pretty sure he holds that substances, not events, are causes . . . You may find a few good insights . . .