Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
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Daily Overview |
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Environment and growth Location: Auditorium B: Frøystein Gjesdal Session Chair: Maria Alsina-Pujols, ETH Zurich | |
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Growing green: how state-level banking deregulation helped reduce industrial emissions 1: ETH Zurich, Switzerland; 2: UZH, Switzerland How does access to finance matter for the greening of our economies? This paper exploits the staggered natural experiment of US state-level banking deregulation and its interaction with regional variation in the tightness of environmental regulation as created by the Clean Air Act (CAA) to shed light on this question. We document that banking deregulation is strongly linked to the reduction of US industrial emissions after 1990. Deregulation improved firm-level access to finance, in particular for small and medium enterprises (SME). Tightening environmental standards requires firms to adapt, either by cleaning up their production (the intensive margin) or by closing down or reallocating their activities to cleaner products or to more lenient jurisdictions (the extensive margin). This usually requires access to credit. We show using employment and emissions data from local economies (states, counties) as well as from individual plants that financially more open local economies saw a swifter reduction in emissions, mainly along the intensive margin. This happened because financially open places had a more elastic credit supply due to a stronger presence of banks with geographically diversified credit portfolios (“integrated banks”). | |