Knowledge that Transforms

• How does product market competition affect corporate environmental footprint? • We examine restructuring of U.S. electric utilities, the number one emissions-intensive sector. • Cost-cutting actions are the key driver of changes in operations and emissions of electric plants. • Cost-cutting actions lower environmental footprint when plant technology allows greener production. • Without such technology, competition worsens environmental outcomes. Banks face pressure to integrate a wider range of risks into lending decisions, including both traditional product-market risks and the increasingly important environmental risk. Yet how these two types of risk interact remains unclear. We show that production technology is pivotal in shaping the impact of product-market competition on environmental risk. Focusing on the restructuring of the US electric utility industry, which introduced product-market competition into a highly polluting sector, we find that technological capacity is key. When technology enables cost-saving production decisions that also improve environmental performance, competition reduces environmental footprint. Otherwise, it exacerbates it. These findings suggest that lenders must assess not only individual risk factors of borrowers but also their potential interactions, with firms’ technological capacity playing a crucial role.

We examine how banks manage carbon transition risk by selling loans given to polluting borrowers to less regulated shadow banks in securitization markets. Exploiting the election of Donald Trump as an exogenous shock that reduces carbon transition risk, we find that banks engage in regulatory arbitrage and use brown loan securitization to manage their exposure to carbon transition risk. Banks are more likely to securitize brown loans when carbon transition risk is high but keep these loans on their balance sheets when the risk is reduced. In addition, securitization enables banks to offer lower interest rates to polluting borrowers but does not affect the supply of green loans. Our findings are more pronounced among banks with low levels of capitalization, domestic banks, and banks that do not display green lending preferences. We discuss how securitization can weaken the effectiveness of bank climate policies.

Search; Bargaining; Markets; Adverse selection;

Small business entrepreneurs facing credit constraints may experience significantly different future income trajectories compared to their unconstrained counterparts. We quantify this difference using uniquely detailed loan application data and a regression discontinuity design based on a bank’s credit score cutoff rule employed in the loan approval process. Our findings indicate that loan acceptance increases recipients’ real income by 11% five years later compared to rejected applicants. This effect persists across a wide range of robustness tests and is primarily driven by the utilization of borrowed funds for profitable investments, as captured by the bank’s ex-ante soft information and the ex-post firm performance. Additionally, within the cohort of accepted applicants, future income is higher for those who were easily accepted compared to marginally accepted borrowers with similar creditworthiness, highlighting the important efficiency effects of loan usage.

What is the impact of a sudden and sizeable increase in bank capital requirements on the lending activity by directly affected banks and by non-affected non-bank financial institutions (NBFIs)? To answer this question, we apply a difference-in-differences methodology around the capital exercise by the European Banking Authority (EBA) in 2011 with German credit register data. We find that insurance companies, financial enterprises, and factoring companies — but not leasing companies or very large NBFIs — and Non-EBA banks expand their corporate lending relative to EBA banks. In particular, NBFIs use the opportunity to expand their credit activities, in riskier and more competitive borrower segments.

Bank adoption of external application programming interfaces (APIs) enables bank customers to share their data more efficiently and securely with other third-party financial institutions and FinTechs, thus enabling open banking and bank data portability. Analyzing determinants of API adoption by U.S. banks from 2007 to 2022, we show that banks that adopt APIs tend to be larger and face lower competitive pressures. The announcement of President Biden’s executive order in July 2021 encouraged increased bank data portability and led to an acceleration in bank API adoption. Banks that adopt APIs experience an increase in Return on Assets ( ROA ) and Tobin’s Q and a decrease in loan loss provisions, particularly after President Biden’s executive order. We find that APIs’ ability to facilitate data access and sharing improves bank information flows and supports banks’ loan and deposit services which form the foundation of notable improvements in bank performance. Overall, our results on the determinants and implications of API adoption have important policy implications for the discussion on open banking regulation and bank data portability.

Using the case of the pogroms that took place in the historical region of the 'Pale of Settlement' in Eastern Europe, this paper analyzes the cultural legacy of ethnic violence and its long-term economic impact on access to finance and on corporate innovation. We find that firms in regions with a higher historical intensity of ethnic persecution face greater financial constraints, relying more on internal finance and experiencing reduced access to external finance. These financial limitations are linked to sluggish innovation activities among present-day firms. We propose that a mechanism of financial antipathy, rooted in a persistent anti-market culture fostered by historical ethnic animosity, explains these effects and reflects a long-term degradation of local social capital. Our results are supported by causal evidence using instrumental variables based on the precursors of historical inter-ethnic violence. The animosity and discrimination against the minority group appear to transfer to the broader economic activities in which that group was involved, creating lasting economic consequences for the majority population – consequences that continue to affect financial development and innovation to the present day.

We provide novel evidence on the loan market benefits of high IPO underpricing. We show that greater underpricing is associated with a significantly larger within-firm reduction of post-IPO borrowing costs. This benefit of underpricing is less pronounced for firms with high ex-ante information asymmetry and is concentrated in firms with a high demand for advertisements. In addition, neither price revision before the IPO nor the short-term or long-term stock return after the IPO has a similar effect. Our results suggest that underpricing affects borrowing costs through an attention channel and highlight a real economic effect of underpricing from the loan market.

This paper investigates the impact of the first system-wide capital relief package adopted by euro area prudential authorities, to support bank lending to firms at the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. By leveraging confidential supervisory and credit register data, we uncover two main findings. First, capital relief measures support banks’ capacity to supply credit to firms. Second, the type of relief matters. Banks increase their credit supply in response to measures that reduce binding capital requirements and affect banks’ ability to distribute dividends. By contrast, discretionary relief measures that do not affect dividend policy are met with limited success. Moreover, requirement releases are more effective for banks with ex-ante lower capital headroom and for lending to smaller firms. These findings provide novel insights on the design of effective bank capital requirement releases in crisis times and, more generally, of policies to support bank credit in times of economic distress.