We analyze how capital requirements from environmental risk exposure affect bank lending to the corporate sector, and how these effects transmit to real economic activity and to greenhouse gas emissions. To do so, we exploit the introduction of a policy in Brazil that required banks to incorporate environmental risks in their capital assessments. Using comprehensive credit data, we find that the policy induces large banks to reallocate their lending away from exposed sectors. The credit contraction has no substantial impact on the real activity and greenhouse gas emissions of these sectors, as smaller banks expand their lending afterwards. However, the policy triggers a moderate labor reallocation from small firms (i.e., those with higher costs of switching lenders) and into large firms within environmentally exposed sectors.

We analyze how the materialization of physical climate risk in the institutional investors’ portfolios spurs a propagation effect on the information content of stock prices. Institutional investors with a relatively high portfolio exposure to natural disasters divest from disaster-hit stocks, decrease the trading intensity in non-hit stocks, and their trading decisions predict low medium-term returns. At the firm-level, institutional investors propagate the effects of disasters to non-hit stocks through reduced incorporation of firm-specific information, especially when the stocks represent a low portfolio weight. Combined, these results suggest that natural disasters trigger a rational reallocation of information-processing resources by institutional investors.

Economists have widely endorsed pricing CO2 emissions to internalize climate change-related externalities. Doing so would significantly affect coal, the most carbon-intensive energy source. However, U.S. coal markets exhibit an additional distortion: the railroads that transport coal to power plants can exert market power. This article estimates how coal-by-rail markups respond to changes in coal demand. I identify markups in a major intermediate goods market using both reduced-form and structural methods. I find that rail carriers reduce coal markups when downstream power plant demand changes due to a drop in the price of natural gas (a competing fuel). My results imply that decreases in coal markups have increased recent U.S. climate damages by $11.9 billion, compared to a counterfactual where markups did not change. Incomplete pass-through would likely erode the environmental benefits of an incremental carbon tax, shifting the tax burden towards upstream railroads. Still, a non-trivial tax would likely increase welfare.