We show that banking relationships promote corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies. Specifically, banks are more likely to grant loans to borrowers with ESG profiles similar to their own and positively influence the borrower’s subsequent ESG performance. Their influence is more pronounced when (1) banks have significantly better ESG ratings than borrowers and (2) borrowers are bank dependent. We exploit M&A among lenders as a source of quasi-exogenous variation in the lender’s ESG standard to alleviate endogeneity concerns. Overall, our study presents the first evidence on the interplay between responsible bank lending and borrowers’ ESG behavior

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) funds have heterogeneous incentives to engage with portfolio firms. If funds view ESG as a value driver, then these incentives will affect funds’ behavior and thus their impact on firms. We compare ESG funds with similar levels of ESG investments but different incentives to engage. Funds with higher incentives to engage, that is, committed ESG funds, conduct more ESG-related information acquisition, pursue longer term investment strategies, engage more intensely on ESG issues, and have greater real impacts. Moreover, committed ESG funds have outperformed other ESG funds within subportfolios with higher and more effective ESG engagement

We propose and implement a procedure to dynamically hedge climate change risk. We extract innovations from climate news series that we construct through textual analysis of newspapers. We then use a mimicking portfolio approach to build climate change hedge portfolios. We discipline the exercise by using third-party ESG scores of firms to model their climate risk exposures. We show that this approach yields parsimonious and industry-balanced portfolios that perform well in hedging innovations in climate news both in sample and out of sample. We discuss multiple directions for future research on financial approaches to managing climate risk