Does it pay to be Green? The impact of equator principles on project loans
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Some financial institutions voluntarily adopt the Equator Principles, requiring them to monitor the environmental and social (ESG) impacts of projects they finance. We investigate the incidence of these costs on corporate borrowers, as well as evidence of benefits in the form of improved loan terms. Using detailed international loan data, we find that borrowers dealing with green banks derive several economic benefits including lower loan spreads. We argue that dealing with ‘green banks’ allows firms to signal their ESG commitment and can help them manage ex post ESG-related risk. The empirical approach also addresses endogeneity concerns. We document other benefits including greater lender participation and the support of Multilateral Development Banks. Our counterfactual analysis, however, shows that if regulatory changes were to encourage working with green banks, firms that only deal with them as a result of the policy would not obtain lower loan spreads.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it