Taxonomy talks, credit walks: The EU's climate disclosure framework and bank lending

Karolin Kirschenmann, Felicitas Koch, Marie-Theres von Schickfus and Christa Hainz

No 26-004, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: We study how mandatory climate-related disclosure affects bank lending using the phased introduction of the EU Taxonomy Regulation. Exploiting the staggered development and implementation of the regulation, we distinguish banks' responses to anticipated disclosure requirements from their responses to realized firm-level sustainability information. Using syndicated loan data from 2016 to 2025 and a loan-level difference-in-differences design, we show that banks adjust lending to regulated firms with greater Taxonomy-eligible exposure following the 2019 announcement, reallocating credit toward similarly exposed non-regulated firms. Once firms report alignment, higher alignment is associated with larger loan volumes. We further show that banks adjust contractual terms to manage transition risk.

Keywords: Green Finance; Climate Regulation; Sustainability Disclosure; Bank Lending (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E43 G18 G21 G32 Q51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/336770/1/1950988775.pdf (application/pdf)

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:zbw:zewdip:336770

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().