Some Don't Like It Hot: Bank Depositors and NGO Campaigns Against Brown Banks

Clément Mazet-Sonilhac and Jean-Stéphane Mésonnier
Additional contact information
Clément Mazet-Sonilhac: Bocconi University [Milan, Italy]

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: We study whether households respond to claims that their bank finances global warming. We leverage new data on NGO campaigns targeting financial institutions involved in climate-damaging, so-called "brown", projects to measure the "brown" reputation of French banks. Using granular data on household deposit holdings in France from 2010 to 2020, we find that the worsened environmental reputation of a bank leads to a lower demand for its deposits. To interpret this as evidence that environmentally motivated customers leave brown banks, we exploit a 2017 regulatory reform that eliminated barriers to switching bank accounts. The relationship between deposit volumes and banks' brown reputation strengthens markedly after the reform, suggesting that reduced frictions allowed households to act on their environmental preferences and change for greener banks.

Keywords: Climate change; Households finance; Fossil banks; Green preferences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-07-08
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://sciencespo.hal.science/hal-04350378v3
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://sciencespo.hal.science/hal-04350378v3/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Some Don't Like It Hot: Bank Depositors and NGO Campaigns Against Brown Banks (2025)
Working Paper: Some Don't Like It Hot: Bank Depositors and NGO Campaigns Against Brown Banks (2025)
Working Paper: Some Don't Like it Hot: Bank Depositors and NGO Campaigns Against Brown Banks (2024)
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:hal:wpaper:hal-04350378

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().