Do fossil fuel finance restrictions promote renewable energy? The moderating role of banking system depth

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Type of the article: Research Article

Abstract
Renewable energy expansion is a cornerstone of environmental policy, yet empirical evidence on whether restricting international public finance for fossil fuels accelerates this transition remains scarce. This study assesses whether international public finance restrictions on fossil fuels promote renewable energy development across a panel of 128 countries, and how banking system depth moderates this policy effect. The analysis employs fixed-effects models with country-specific linear trends, validated through event-study, placebo, and first-difference checks, drawing on World Bank and Clean Energy Transition Partnership data. The results indicate that fossil fuel finance restrictions increase the share of renewable energy in total final energy consumption by 11.5-15.3 percentage points (p < 0.05), representing a relative increase of 40–53% compared with the sample mean of 28.9%. The first-difference estimator confirms that restrictions add nearly 1 percentage point to annual growth in the renewable energy share (β = 0.908, p = 0.013). The effect concentrates on non-hydro technologies: excluding hydropower, the estimated increase reaches 15.1 percentage points (p = 0.013), indicating that the policy primarily stimulates solar and wind deployment. Banking system depth significantly moderates these effects (p < 0.05): the policy impact is virtually zero where domestic credit is below 25% of GDP, but reaches 12.9 percentage points where credit exceeds 100% of GDP. This conditional pattern shows that fossil fuel finance restrictions deliver meaningful environmental gains only where the financial system can redirect capital toward renewable energy investment.

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    • Figure 1. Event study: Effect of fossil fuel finance restrictions on renewable electricity generation
    • Figure 2. Marginal effect of fossil fuel finance restrictions by banking system development
    • Table 1. Descriptive statistics
    • Table 2. Event study coefficients − Parallel trends test
    • Table 3. Renewable energy consumption (% of total final energy)
    • Table 4. Renewable electricity generation (% of total)
    • Table 5. Robustness checks
    • Table 6. Subsample analysis and interaction effects
    • Table A1. Countries included in the analytical sample
    • Table A2. Variable definitions and sources
    • Table A3. Treatment timing: Fossil fuel finance restriction adoption
    • Table B1. Pairwise correlation matrix
    • Table C1. Pre-treatment balance: Treated vs. control countries (2010–2018)
    • Table D1. First-difference estimation: Renewable electricity (DV1) vs. renewable energy consumption (DV2)
    • Table E1. Placebo tests: Shifting treatment dates backward
    • Table F1. Leave-one-out sensitivity analysis (DV2: Renewable energy consumption)
    • Table F2. Treated countries: Pre/post renewable energy shares and predicted effects
    • Table F3. Predicted marginal effect of fossil fuel finance restrictions by country
    • Conceptualization
      Muslum Mursalov, Victoria Kovalenko
    • Data curation
      Muslum Mursalov
    • Funding acquisition
      Muslum Mursalov, Victoria Kovalenko
    • Investigation
      Muslum Mursalov, Victoria Kovalenko
    • Methodology
      Muslum Mursalov, Victoria Kovalenko
    • Project administration
      Muslum Mursalov, Victoria Kovalenko
    • Resources
      Muslum Mursalov, Victoria Kovalenko
    • Supervision
      Muslum Mursalov, Victoria Kovalenko
    • Writing – original draft
      Muslum Mursalov, Victoria Kovalenko
    • Writing – review & editing
      Muslum Mursalov, Victoria Kovalenko
    • Formal Analysis
      Victoria Kovalenko
    • Software
      Victoria Kovalenko
    • Validation
      Victoria Kovalenko
    • Visualization
      Victoria Kovalenko