Carbon Emissions and the Bank-Lending Channel

Peydró, José-Luis and Marcin Kacperczyk
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Jose-Luis Peydro

No 16778, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We study how firm-level carbon emissions affect bank lending and, through this channel, real, financial, and environmental outcomes in a sample of global firms with syndicated loans. For identification, we use bank-level commitments to carbon neutrality to proxy for changes in banks’ green preferences and, via these bank commitments, shocks to firms with previous credit from these banks. We find that firms with higher (lower) scope-1 emission levels previously borrowing from banks making commitments subsequently receive less (more) total bank credit. The economic mechanism at play is bank credit supply, and results are consistent with bank preferences for green rather than differential response to an increased firm risk. The reduction in bank lending to brown firms triggers the reduction in these firms’ total debt, leverage, total assets, and real investments. The effects are non-linear, with a strong cut (increase) in lending and investments for brown (green) firms, and mild effects for other firms. Despite the real and financial effects, we find no improvement in hard firm-level environmental scores for brown firms, but only evidence consistent with firms’ greenwashing. Overall, our results suggest that banks affect carbon emissions via credit reallocation (from brown to green firms) rather than via providing loans to brown firms for the investment necessary to reduce carbon emissions.

Keywords: Carbon emissions; Bank lending; Real effects; Environmental performance; Greenwashing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D62 G12 G21 G23 G30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-12
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP16778 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:16778

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP16778

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().