In the past two decades, several banks have joined global initiatives aimed at enhancing the disclosure of their assets and climate commitments. We study whether banks that joined such initiatives have altered the emissions exposure of their syndicated loans. We rely on loan-level data with global coverage combined with country-industry data on emissions. We find that on average, banks have reduced the emissions exposure of their syndicated loans portfolio. However, we do not find statistically significant or robust differences between banks that did and those that did not subscribe to climate commitments. In the few instances where we found a statistically significant change after becoming a signatory to a climate initiative, the effect was temporary or did not survive our robustness testing. We conclude that, on average, while banks reduced their relative lending to high-emission sectors, voluntary climate commitments did not contribute to syndicated loan reallocation away from those sectors.
Suggested citation:
Hale, Galina, Brigid Meisenbacher, Rami Najjar, and Fernanda Nechio. 2026. “Industrial Composition of Syndicated Loans and Banks’ Climate Commitments.” Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Working Paper 2024-23. https://doi.org/10.24148/wp2024-23