We ask if bank supervisors’ efforts to combat climate change affect banks’ lending and their borrowers’ transition to the carbon-neutral economy. Combining information from the French supervisory agency’s climate pilot exercise with borrowers’ emission data, we first show that banks that participate in the exercise increase lending to high-carbon emitters but simultaneously charge higher interest rates. Second, participating banks collect new information about climate risks, and boost lending for green purposes. Third, receiving credit from a participating bank facilitates borrowers’ efforts to improve environmental performance. Our findings establish a hitherto undocumented link between banking supervision and the transition to net-zero.

Relying on confidential supervisory data related to the 2016 EU-wide stress test, this paper presents novel empirical evidence that supervisory scrutiny associated to stress testing has a disciplining effect on bank risk. We find that banks that participated in the 2016 EU-wide stress test subsequently reduced their credit risk relative to banks that were not part of this exercise. Relying on new metrics for supervisory scrutiny that measure the quantity, potential impact, and duration of interactions between banks and supervisors during the stress test, we find that the disciplining effect is stronger for banks subject to more intrusive supervisory scrutiny during the exercise. We also find that a strong risk management culture is a prerequisite for the supervisory scrutiny to be effective. Finally, we show that a similar disciplining effect is not exerted neither by higher capital charges nor by more transparency and related market discipline induced by the stress test.

The unexpected shock represented by the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates the importance of building robust macroprudential frameworks to increase countries’ resilience against sudden disruptions in financial markets. By now, a widespread opinion among commentators and policy makers is that the macroprudential frameworks that were implemented over the past decades were effective in moderating market stress, a view supported by ample evidence on the effectiveness of macroprudential policies.

Die Arbeit untersucht die Wechselwirkungen zwischen der Mikro- und Makroebene, indem die Auswirkungen von Informationen auf der Mikroebene auf die Dynamik von aggregierten Investitionen betrachtet werden. In einem weiteren Beitrag wird untersucht, inwieweit Stress auf der Ebene der staatlichen Refinanzierung und Bankenstress zum Anstieg sowohl des Niveaus als auch der Heterogenität der Refinanzierungskosten nicht-finanzieller Unternehmen in der Eurozone während der europäischen Schuldenkrise beigetragen haben und wie sie den monetären Transmissionsmechanismus beeinflusst haben. Im 3. Forschungspapier wird analysiert, wie Investitionen auf Unternehmensebene durch Interaktionen zwischen dem Unternehmen und der Gesamtebene in der Eurozone beeinflusst werden.