Financial institutions

Impacts of ESG banking regulation on financing new sustainable technologies

08/07/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

How does environmental, social and governance regulation of banks affect capital provision to the sustainability transition? As ambitious sustainability targets face funding challenges, the financial sector is tasked with channeling more private capital into sustainable investments. However, scaling sustainable technologies often requires investment in non-ESG-compliant assets. The mobility transition to electric vehicles, for example, demands increased supply of battery raw materials like Lithium, Cobalt, Manganese, and Nickel.

FEDS Paper: Mega Firms and New Technological Trajectories in the U.S.

08/06/2025 Federal Reserve Central banks

Joonkyu Choi, Serguey Braguinsky, Yuheng Ding, Karam Jo, Seula KimWe provide evidence that mega firms have played an increasingly important role in shaping new technological trajectories in recent years. While the share of novel patents—defined as patents introducing new combinations of technological components— produced by mega firms declined until around 2000, it has rebounded sharply since then.

Bank lending implications of climate stress tests

08/06/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

Do climate stress tests affect bank credit supply to brown firms? Using a difference-in-differences approach and detailed data on individual bank loans in the euro area, this paper provides novel evidence on the effects of the ECB’s 2022 climate risk stress test. Despite no capital implications or public disclosures, participating banks significantly reduced credit to greenhouse gas-intensive industries relative to nonparticipants. Among affected firms, smaller borrowers were more negatively impacted.

FEDS Paper: Discussion of “Dynamic Causal Effects in a Nonlinear World: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”

08/05/2025 Federal Reserve Central banks

Edward P. Herbst and Benjamin K. JohannsenThis comment discusses Kolesár and Plagborg-Møller's (2025) finding that the standard linear local projection (LP) estimator recovers the average marginal effect (AME) even in nonlinear settings. We apply and discuss a subset their results using a simple nonlinear time series model, emphasizing the role of the weighting function and the impact of nonlinearities on small-sample properties.

The impact of climate litigation risk on firms’ cost of bank loans

08/05/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

Using a novel worldwide dataset of 5,264 syndicated loans issued to 329 firms from 2006 to 2021, we study how climate-related litigation risk affects firm’s cost of borrowing. We find robust empirical evidence that firms targeted by climate lawsuits pay significantly higher spreads on their bank loans. These effects are more pronounced for firms with weaker environmental performance and higher ESG controversies. The results suggest that lender’s view climate litigation as a material risk factor, which is increasingly priced into debt contracts.

Beyond averages: heterogeneous effects of monetary policy in a HANK model for the euro area

08/04/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

We introduce an estimated medium scale Heterogeneous-Agent New Keynesian model for forecasting and policy analysis in the Euro Area and discuss the applications of this type of models in central banks, focusing on two main exercises. First, we examine an alternative scenario for monetary policy during the early 2020s inflationary episode, showing that earlier hikes in interest rates would have affected more strongly households at the lower end of the wealth distribution, whose consumption our model suggests was already depressed relative to the rest of the population.

Hand-to-mouth banks: deposit inflows and the marginal propensity to lend

08/04/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

In modern macroeconomics, the marginal propensity to consume out of transitory income shocks is a central object of interest. This paper empirically explores a parallel concept in banking: the marginal propensity to lend out of unsolicited deposit inflows (MPLD). Using county-level dividend payouts as an instrument for deposit inflows, I estimate the MPLD for U.S. banks and show that before QE, the average bank operated “hand-to-mouth” — it transformed approximately every dollar of deposit inflow into new loans, consistent with tight liquidity constraints.

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