Do climate-oriented regulatory policies affect the flow of credit towards polluting firms? We match loan-level data to firm-level greenhouse gas emissions to assess the impact of the Paris Agreement. We find that, following this agreement, European banks reallocated credit away from polluting firms in relative terms. Specifically, euro area banks’ loan share to more polluting firms decreased by about 3percentage points compared to less polluting (or “green”) firms after the 2015 Paris Agreement (COP21). This result is stronger for banks that are well capitalized, have lower credit quality, and are less profitable.

We match firm-corporate governance characteristics with firm-level carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions over the period 2009–2019 to study the relationship between gender diversity in the workplace and firm carbon emissions. We find that a 1 percentage point increase in the percentage of female managers within the firm leads to a 0.5% decrease in CO2 emissions. We document that this effect is statistically significant, also when controlling for institutional differences caused by more patriarchal and hierarchical cultures and religions. At the same time, we show that gender diversity at the managerial level has stronger mitigating effects on climate change if females are also well-represented outside the organization, e.g. in political institutions and civil society organizations. Finally, we find that, after the Paris Agreement, firms with greater gender diversity reduced their CO2 emissions by about 5% more than firms with more male managers.

We investigate the impact of capital requirements on bank lending across institutional sectors, focusing on their transmission channel and the interaction with monetary policy. By employing confidential loan-level data for the euro area, we find that the reaction of banks to capital surcharges for Other Systemically Important Institutions (O-SII) depends on the level of the required buffer and the institutional sector of the borrowing counterpart. Tighter requirements correspond to stronger lending contractions with targeted banks curtailing their lending mostly towards credit institutions. Loan supply to non-financial corporations is almost unchanged, mainly as a result of the incentives embedded in the ECB's targeted long-term refinancing operations. Our results provide evidence on the interaction between macroprudential and monetary policy, and the positive effects of combining two different sets of incentives to support the resilience of the banking system and credit supply to the real economy.