Design of sustainable performance targets: Mitigating greenwashing in sustainability-linked loans

IF 14.2 2区经济学 Q1 ECONOMICS

Energy Economics Pub Date : 2025-08-21 DOI:10.1016/j.eneco.2025.108843

Bing Xia , Qi Ma , Yong Jun Pan

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Sustainability-linked loans (SLLs) are an innovative, sustainable financial tool that ties preferential interest rates (PIRs) to a company's sustainability-performance targets (SPTs). This study addresses two common greenwashing (GW) behaviours in SLLs, project misrepresentation and weak SPTs, focusing on carbon-emission (CE) targets as a key SPT indicator. A signaling game model is used, involving a bank and two companies with differing decarbonising capabilities and production risks. We compare the SPT signaling mechanism with traditional loan request (LR) signaling based on signal cost criteria. The results show that a separating equilibrium in the SPT signaling game only exists when the green process's decarbonising capability exceeds a certain threshold. Furthermore, a smaller gap in production risk and a larger difference in decarbonising capabilities enhance the SPT-signaling effectiveness. To address weak SPTs, we propose a feasible range for CE targets that ensures company participation, covers bank risks, and accurately identifies green companies. Finally, we suggest how banks can set favourable interest rates (IRs) to support enforcing stricter CE targets, thereby enhancing the SLLs' sustainability incentives.

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设计可持续绩效目标：减少与可持续发展相关的贷款中的“漂绿”现象

可持续发展挂钩贷款（sll）是一种创新的、可持续的金融工具，它将优惠利率（pir）与公司的可持续发展绩效目标（spt）联系起来。本研究探讨了sll中两种常见的洗绿（GW）行为，即项目虚假陈述和弱SPT，重点关注碳排放（CE）目标作为SPT的关键指标。本文使用了一个信号博弈模型，涉及一家银行和两家具有不同脱碳能力和生产风险的公司。基于信号成本标准，将SPT信号机制与传统的贷款请求（LR）信号机制进行了比较。结果表明，绿色过程脱碳能力超过一定阈值时，SPT信号博弈中才存在分离平衡。此外，较小的生产风险差距和较大的脱碳能力差异增强了spt信号的有效性。为了解决薄弱的环保措施，我们提出了一个可行的环保目标范围，以确保公司参与，涵盖银行风险，并准确识别绿色公司。最后，我们建议银行如何设定有利利率（ir）来支持执行更严格的可持续发展目标，从而增强sll的可持续性激励。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Energy Economics ECONOMICS-

CiteScore

18.60

自引率

12.50%

发文量

524

期刊介绍： Energy Economics is a field journal that focuses on energy economics and energy finance. It covers various themes including the exploitation, conversion, and use of energy, markets for energy commodities and derivatives, regulation and taxation, forecasting, environment and climate, international trade, development, and monetary policy. The journal welcomes contributions that utilize diverse methods such as experiments, surveys, econometrics, decomposition, simulation models, equilibrium models, optimization models, and analytical models. It publishes a combination of papers employing different methods to explore a wide range of topics. The journal's replication policy encourages the submission of replication studies, wherein researchers reproduce and extend the key results of original studies while explaining any differences. Energy Economics is indexed and abstracted in several databases including Environmental Abstracts, Fuel and Energy Abstracts, Social Sciences Citation Index, GEOBASE, Social & Behavioral Sciences, Journal of Economic Literature, INSPEC, and more.