We examine whether environmental, social and governance (ESG) scores of European banks impact on their risk‐taking behavior and on bank value. We find that high ESG scores are associated with a modest reduction in risk‐taking for banks that are high or low risk‐takers, and that the impact is conditional on executive board characteristics. These findings are consistent with the “stakeholder” view of ESG activities. However, high ESG scores are also associated with a reduction in bank value consistent with the “overinvestment” view of ESG whereby scare resources are diverted from investment. The decline in bank value occurs notwithstanding a positive indirect link between ESG scores and bank value through their impact on risk taking. We conclude that there is a trade‐off between reducing bank risk‐taking and a more stable financial system on the one hand and bank value on the other.

We use heterogeneous panel cointegration techniques to examine the long-run effect of financial development on income inequality in a panel of 119 countries from 1980 to 2015. We include real GDP per capita in the cointegration relation and explicitly deal with cross-sectional dependence in the data that arises due to unobserved common factors. On average, financial development reduces income inequality in the long-run, with the result robust to different measures of finance and across country income groups.

We examine the determinants of CDS spreads for a sample of European and US banks. The key balance sheet determinants are leverage, asset quality, funding stability, and bank size, and the key market determinants are equity returns, the term structure of interest rates and bank-specific and host country sovereign credit risk. Our results would appear to confirm the applicability of Merton (1974)-type models extended to include market variables to the understanding of bank credit risk.

We examine whether the effect of NPLs on bank credit growth differs depending upon the level of bank capital and profitability in a panel of up to 521 banks from 28 European countries. Our main finding is that there is a significant positive interaction effect of NPLs and bank capital and NPLs and profitability on the supply of bank credit. Thus, whether NPLs impede the monetary policy transmission mechanism depends substantially on whether or not banks are sufficiently capitalized and profitable. Policy actions aimed at reducing NPLs to sustain bank credit should protect bank capital and profitability if they are to be effective, including by supporting efforts that aim at returning NPLs to good standing.

No abstract