Being Stranded the Carbon Bubble? Climate Policy Risk and the Pricing of Bank Loans Manthos D. Delis Montpellier Business School Kathrin de Greiff University of Zurich and Swiss Finance Institute Steven Ongena University of Zurich, Swiss Finance Institute, KU Leuven and CEPR February 20, 2019 * Coordinates of the authors: Delis: Montpellier Business School, Montpellier Research in Management, 2300 avenue des moulins, 34000, Montpellier, France, e-mail:
[email protected]; de Greiff: Plattenstrasse 32, CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland, phone: +41 44 634 52 39, e-mail:
[email protected]; Ongena: Plattenstrasse 14, CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland, phone: + 41 44 634 39 54, e-mail:
[email protected]. We are grateful to Kristian Blickle, Patrick Bolton, Bob Buhr, Yannis Dafermos, Taran Faehn, Iftekhar Hasan, Charles Kahn, Sotirios Kokas, Basma Majerbi, Jean-Stéphane Mesonnier, Pierre Monnin, Maria Nikolaidi, Jose Scheinkman, Guido Schotten, Katrin Tinn, and Chris Tsoumas, for very helpful comments and discussions. We are also grateful to participants at the RFS-Imperial Business School Climate Finance Conference (London), the CEP-DNB Workshop on Central Banking and Green Finance (Amsterdam), the 12th Swiss Winter Conference on Financial Intermediation (Lenzerheide), the EcoMod2018 conference (Venice), the 1st Annual CoPFiR Conference (Brussels), the BBLS (Zurich), and the Geneva Summit on Sustainable Finance 2018 (Geneva). De Greiff and Ongena acknowledge financial support from ERC ADG 2016 - GA 740272 lending. Being Stranded with Fossil Fuel Reserves? Climate Policy Risk and the Pricing of Bank Loans Abstract Does neglecting the possibility that fossil fuel reserves become “stranded” result in a «carbon bubble», i.e., an overvaluation of fossil fuel firms? To address this question, we study whether banks price the climate policy risk.