Can easing financial constraints reduce carbon emissions?: evidence from a large sample of French companies

Abstract

This paper studies how monetary policy can shape firm-level carbon emissions and energy efficiency. It also looks at the heterogeneity of these effects by firm size, the underlying transmission channels and interaction with climate policies. The authors draw on administrative and survey data on French manufacturing firms for the period 2000–2019, including emissions, energy use, financial conditions, environmental protection investments and productivity. They examine the effect of credit easing following a variation to interest rate policy made by the European Central Bank in July 2012. They find that financially constrained firms cut emissions by about 9.4% more than unconstrained ones. This effect primarily stems from improvements in energy efficiency, reduced carbon intensity of energy, and general productivity improvements associated with capital deepening that outweighed modest scale effects. The results are driven by small and medium-sized firms. Large firms including those regulated by the EU emissions trading system (ETS) showed no significant response. On average, emissions fell by 3.3% per year, summing up to 5.3 million tonnes of CO2 saved (comparable to the savings from the EU ETS), highlighting the untargeted nature of the policy.