迎风而上：台风灾害与银行风险行为

Abstract

Climate change has become a major challenge to all of humankind with profound impacts on the financial and economic system. As an extreme weather event occurring with high frequency and intensity, typhoons not only cause great damage to economic activities but also have a powerful impact on the financial sector, which in turn triggers a series of chain reactions and feedback behaviors. This paper empirically examines the impact of typhoon disasters on banks' risk behavior by taking 295 local commercial banks in China during 2010-2019 as research objects, matching the operational data of 3452 A-share listed companies and combining these with the Holland wind field model to calculate a typhoon destructive power index at the city level. The paper also examines the mediating effects of corporate total factor productivity and corporate fixed asset losses and it further analyzes the resulting series of chain reactions and feedback behaviors including changes in banks' risk appetite and credit decisions. The empirical analyses yield several findings. First, typhoon disasters significantly raise banks' non-performing loan ratios (NPLRs) and increase banks' credit risk, and they raise banks' NPLRs significantly more in coastal areas than in inland areas. Second, the rise in corporate fixed asset losses and the decline in corporate total factor productivity levels are important channels through which typhoon disasters affect banks' NPL ratios. Third, further analyses show that the process by which typhoon disasters' effect on financial institutions is transmitted is not monolithic. Typhoon disasters first hit the real economy, then are transmitted to the financial system, and finally swing back to the real economy. Specifically, after being affected by a typhoon disaster, the production and operation of enterprises fall into "economic difficulties", which are transmitted to the bank level, making banks' NPLR increase (i.e., an increase in passive risk-taking). This further affects banks' future credit decision-making, such as causing them to tighten the extent of credit and reduce their appetite for risk (i.e., a decrease in active risk-taking). This in turn feeds back to the enterprise level, increasing the cost of financing for enterprises and ultimately magnifying the impact of the typhoon disaster on overall economic and financial activities. This study provides new empirical evidence for banks' climate risk governance.