research

• The Rise of Green Banks in the U.S. (Job Market Paper)

Abstract: I examine how U.S. Green Banks (i.e., public or mission-driven lenders that recycle capital for climate-related projects) shape the flow of green finance in the U.S. I assemble project-level microdata for 11 public and quasi-public Green Banks across nine states, and present first evidence that higher borrowing costs and coordination frictions lower the likelihood of private co-financing while raising the Green Bank’s dollar contribution per project. A simple Stackelberg model, with a welfare-maximizing Green Bank that co-finances with profit-maximizing lenders, highlights leverage caps and coordination frictions as key constraints.

📅 Upcoming presentations: NBER Climate Finance PhD Workshop (October 2025); FINEST Workshop (October 2025)

• International Climate News (with R. Colacito, M.M. Croce, and B. Yang) (R&R at Review of Financial Studies)

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Abstract: We develop novel high-frequency indices that measure climate attention across a wide range of developed and emerging economies. By analyzing the text of over 23 million Tweets published by leading national newspapers, we find that a country experiencing more severe climate news shocks tends to see both an inflow of capital and an appreciation of its currency. In addition, brown stocks experience large and persistent negative returns after a global climate news shock if located in highly exposed countries. A risk-sharing model in which investors price climate news shocks and trade consumption and investment goods in global markets rationalizes these findings.

📅 Upcoming presentations: NBER Summer Institute: International Finance & Macroeconomics (July 2025); EFA (August 2025)

📝 Slides: here.

• Climate Policy Risk and Cross-Border Lending (with D. Igan and K. Takahashi)

Abstract: We explore to what extent climate risk is reflected in cross-border lending decisions in the syndicated loan market. We construct a climate risk index for a wide range of countries using major newspapers' posts on Twitter. We find that when policy risk in climate news increases in a lender’s home country, their engagement in cross-border lending to firms in brown sectors increases. Our results suggest that lenders evaluate the climate policy risks at home and borrowers’ country when they allocate credit across countries. Furthermore, the effect is more pronounced for lenders who have a higher exposure to firms in brown sectors.

📅 Upcoming presentations: BIS (October 2023)

• Crypto Frictions for Fiat Currencies (with N. Borri and M.M. Croce)

📅 Upcoming presentations: MUR-PRIN Bocconi Workshop (April 2025)

📝 Slides: here.

• When the Markets Get CO.V.I.D.: COntagion, Viruses, and Information Diffusion (2024) (with M.M. Croce, P. Farroni and I. Wolfskeil) Journal of Financial Economics, Vol. 157: 103850.

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Abstract: We quantify the exposure of major financial markets to news shocks about global contagion risk while accounting for local epidemic conditions. For a wide cross section of countries, we construct a novel dataset comprising (i) announcements related to COVID19 and (ii) high-frequency data on epidemic news diffused through Twitter (Hassan et al. 2019's methodology). We provide novel empirical evidence about financial dynamics both around epidemic announcements and at daily/intra-daily frequencies. Analysis of contagion data and social media activity about COVID19 suggest that the market price of contagion risk is significant.

📝 Slides: here.