IFin Seminar, José-Luis Peydró - Imperial College London "Carbon Emissions and the Bank-Lending Channel"
Institute of Finance
Date: 18 November 2021 / 12:25 - 13:40
Speaker: José-Luis Peydró - Imperial College London
Title: "Carbon Emissions and the Bank-Lending Channel"
Date: November 18, 2021
Time: 12:25 - 13:40
Room: Virtual on Zoom invitation
Lugano Campus
Abstract
We study how firm-level carbon emissions affect bank lending and, through this channel, real decisions in a sample of global firms with syndicated loans. Using bank-level commitments to carbon neutrality to measure changes in banks’ green preferences, we show that firms with higher (lower) scope-1 emission levels borrowing from banks making commitments subsequently receive less (more) bank credit, even controlling for differences in their fundamentals. The bank decisions to reallocate credit more likely reflect their preferences for green rather than their differential response to an increased business risk. The reduction in bank lending to a brown sector lowers this sector’s real investments but even then, these firms do not improve their environmental scores.