Green and sustainable finance: evidence from European banks

• Autor(a) principal: Maggio, Gabriele
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/138138
• topic: Directed research; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

The aim of this thesis is to analyze the impact of Green and Sustainable practices on banks’ profitability in Europe. In the first part of the work are discussed definitions and principles of the main green financial products. Then the paper analyzes the European institutional background underpinning the Green Finance market. In the final section a Fixed Effects panel model is used to detect the impact of Green practices on European banks’ performances. Two different samples are considered in the empirical analysis: one composed by 40 significant banks and a reduced one that considers 30 banks that joined the Equator Principles Framework, both covering the period 2010-2020. Among other bank specific and macroeconomic explanatory variables, ESG score and Green and Sustainable Lending activity are used as measure of sustainability for each institution. Green and Sustainable Lending activity assumes two different forms: a dummy variable for the first sample and a growth rate for the second one. The estimation results show no significance of these green variables in the broad sample and a positive significant impact of the Green and Sustainable Lending activity growth rate on ROE in the reduced green sample, showing that Green and Sustainable practices positively affect European green banks’ profitability.