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This paper aims to quantify the (syndicated) loan exposure to elevated environmental risk sectors of the banking system in the USA, EU, China, Japan and Switzerland at US$1.6tn and to highlight its importance, which ranges from 3.8 (USA) to 0.5 per cent (China) in terms of total national banking assets. The paper highlights the relevance of exploring prudential policy responses, including a harmonized taxonomy, statistical and reporting framework that could contribute to internalizing the negative externalities associated with climate risks by both banks and their supervisors. Among the prudential supervisory tools, credit registers facilitate the assessment of environmental risk drivers in “carbon stress tests.” This paper also presents a framework of analysis for the regulatory treatment of climate-related risks.

Similarly to Weyzig et al. (2014), this paper uses financial databases on the banks’ role as book runners for syndicated loans; that is, as the lead arrangers who also provide a large share of the actual lending. Loans are outstanding on December 31, 2014, and the paper assumes linear amortization of loans issued before that date and with maturity after that date. This study includes the largest banks from the above-mentioned countries with financial information available in SNL Financial and EU banks with financial information available in the ECB database on December 31, 2014. By assessing the relative share of the ten largest (or total reporting if less) banks’ exposure to each high environmental risk sector in relation to their total assets, these findings can be extrapolated across sectors in the respective country.

This paper quantifies the loan exposure to elevated environmental risk sectors of the banking system in the USA, EU, China, Japan and Switzerland in US$1.6tn, broadly in line with the findings of Battiston et al. (2017) and Weyzig et al. (2014). This paper also explores prudential policy approaches and tools. In addition to the lack of taxonomy of “brown” vs “green,” the paper identifies the limitations to assess the risks involved in the transition to a low-carbon economy: supervisory reports that do not make full use of the existing international statistical framework (e.g. EU COREP and FINREP); lack of harmonized reporting requirements of environmental risks; lack of credit registers as tools to perform carbon stress-testing; and supervisors’ governance framework that do not internalize environmental risks (e.g. proposed revision of the Basel Core Principles of Banking Supervision). As per the stress-testing, the paper presents two examples. The paper presents a framework of analysis for the regulatory treatment of climate-related risks. The author identifies two critical elements of such framework if prudential regulation of environmental risks is to be considered: the consideration or not of climate risk as credit risk and the impact of environmental risks over probabilities of default over the entire business cycle.

No internationally accepted “official” taxonomy of high environmental risk sectors exists. This paper uses Moody’s (2015a) classification of sectors according to their environmental risk exposure. This paper’s exposures do not reflect the real risk exposure of these institutions and the banking industry as a whole because, as explained in Page 6, these values are without regard to bilateral loans and guarantees and securitizations of loans; in the case of loans to power generation companies, renewable sources are not excluding and, similarly, for the production of electric vehicles, loans are not excluded. Furthermore, this paper does not assess banks’ exposures to sovereigns subject to high environmental risks and bonds and equity issued by corporations operating in high environmental risk sectors.

Contribution to the present policy debate on how to regulate banks’ exposure to high environmental risk and how to manage the transition to a low-carbon economy.

This paper can increase awareness of the banking sector transition risks to a low-carbon economy.

This paper quantifies banks direct exposures to high environmental risk sectors using an ample definition of sectors exposed to environmental risk. The author suggests policy actions to assess the environmental risks. The author defines a regulatory framework for banks to internalize the negative externalities of environmental risks.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the complexities of reorganizing and/or liquidating troubled banks under the European Union's (EU) current institutional framework as it is defined by its directives and by national supervisory, remedial, and insolvency practices.

The paper compares provisions of different EU directives that impact financial institutions and summarizes national remedial practices.

The paper documents the diversity that currently exists among national supervisory, remedial and failure resolution practices for banks. It also assesses the economic efficiency of the institutional framework for resolving problem banks that is defined by the Reorganization and Winding‐up Directive and identifies components of the directive that can hamper efficient cross‐border resolutions.

There is a deficiency in publicly available information on EU member countries' practices for disciplining and resolving troubled banks.

The paper assesses issues/conditions that can hamper efficient cross‐border resolutions – issues on which policymakers should focus when they reform the current framework. It also explores areas of coordination with other EU directives that deal with financial crisis management that are relevant in the current financial crisis.

The paper makes policy recommendations for reforming the EU's current institutional framework for resolving troubled banks.

In this chapter, the authors study how external knowledge contributes to the innovation results of firms in transition economies. Specifically, the authors distinguish between product and process innovations and identify the geographical origin of external knowledge – from the home country or from abroad. Theoretically, the authors discuss the innovation systems of transition economies and the effects of foreign and national external knowledge on product and process innovations in these under-researched contexts. Using a sample of firms from 19 countries from wave V of the Business Environment and Enterprise Surveys, the authors find that foreign and national external knowledge both contribute to the achievement of product and process innovations. However, the two types of external knowledge exert different effects depending on the innovation outcome analyzed. Firms in transition countries that incorporate foreign external knowledge are more likely to achieve product innovations than those that acquire national external knowledge. In contrast, both types of knowledge are equally useful for achieving process innovations.

The purpose of this paper is to review current trends in reforms of the supervisory architecture in European Union (EU) countries.

Against the background of the debate on the advisability of further centralizing prudential supervision in the EU this paper develops a study of applied institutional economics, analyzing the financial supervisory architecture of each of the 27 EU countries and assesses their degree of institutional convergence. The paper investigate whether the recent wave of reforms are leading to a convergence of the national architectures.

While the degree of supervisory convergence is low, there is no single superior model of bank supervision.

The paper contributes to the debate on convergence of supervisory architectures in EU member countries.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the rationale for Bank Recovery and Resolution Funds (BRRFs) in the context of the present European Union's (EU) decentralized safety net.

The paper makes some reflections on the governance aspects of BRRFs that would require minimum harmonization in the EU, emphasizing that BRRFs are only one institutional component of financial institutions' effective and credible resolution regime. This paper focuses on depository institutions, but the rationale of BRRFs could be extended to other credit institutions.

BRRFs contribute to shifting the government's trade‐off between bailing out and restructuring in favour of restructuring, to the extent that there is also an effective bank resolution legal framework. In turn, banks' contributions to BRRFs aim at discouraging their excess systemic risk creation, particularly through financial system leverage.

The paper provides input in the current regulatory debate to develop new measures for the reform of the regulatory framework of financial services in the EU.

Purpose – The main aim of this chapter is to analyse the implications of innovation and, directly and indirectly, of cooperation on the internationalisation of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS). Specifically, we analyse the potential impact of innovation capability on the propensity of KIBS to internationalise. We also look at whether cooperation has any influence on the international growth of these firms or on their innovation results.

Methodology/approach – This is an empirical research. Empirical analyses are based on information provided by the Spanish Technological Innovation Panel data for the period 2003–2005. Tobit and probit models are estimated to test our hypotheses.

Findings – The empirical findings support all our theoretical hypotheses. A positive relationship between cooperation, innovation and internationalisation of KIBS is also found. Thus, the results confirm the relevance of innovation for internationalisation. KIBS that establish collaborative relationships find access to international markets easier and improve their innovation capability. In these terms, cooperation is found to be directly and indirectly related with internationalisation in KIBS.

Originality/value of paper – The services sector is the most important sector in Spain and Europe nowadays, and it is the sector that has experienced the fastest growth in recent years. However, the research efforts it has received have not been commensurate with its size and role in international commerce. In general, the literature has paid scant attention to the relationships between innovation and internationalisation in services sectors, and more specifically, among KIBS. This chapter sheds light on this topic.

This paper aims to analyse the economics of financing banking supervision and attempts to respond to two questions: What are the most common financing practices? Can the differences in current financing practices be explained by country‐specific factors, using a path‐dependence approach?

The paper performs an empirical analysis that identifies the determinants of the financing structure of banks' prudential supervision using a sample of 90 banking supervisors (central banks and financial authorities).

The paper concludes that supervisors in central banks are more likely to be publicly funded, while financial authorities are more likely to be funded via a levy on the regulated banks. The financing rule is also explained by the structure of the financial systems. Public funding is more likely in bank‐oriented structures. Finally, the geographical factor is also significant: European bank supervisors are more oriented towards the private funding regime.

In general, the paper does not find evidence of the role of the political factor, the size of the economy, the level of development and the legal tradition.

The paper analyses the financial governance of banking supervision in a sample of 90 countries world‐wide. The empirical analysis focuses on the financing rules and identifies factors that explain the differences between supervisory authorities.

Purpose – This chapter analyzes the relation between normative and cultural-cognitive institutional distance and the international entry forms of SMEs. We also examine the interaction effect of each of these distances and the regulatory development of the destination on entry mode choice.

Methodology/approach – This chapter deals with a multilevel analysis of a database of European SMEs containing information on different locations and three entry forms: exports; collaborative modes and direct investment.

Findings – The results indicate that greater levels of normative distance increase the likelihood of using collaborative forms in SMEs. Similarly, the findings also show that the preference for collaborative forms grows as the cultural-cognitive distance increases. In both cases, the study finds a positive moderating effect of regulative institutions on these relations.

Originality/value of chapter – The chapter contributes to the literature by separately considering informal institutional dimensions such as normative and cultural-cognitive distances, as well as examining how the regulatory development of the destination may moderate these relations. Additionally, the study sheds light in the development of the literature on SMEs, both by using the institutional theory to explain the internationalization of these firms and providing a more complete picture of their entry modes.