Stefanie Kleimeier

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Welcome to my homepage. Here you can learn about my research and teaching, find links to my latest working papers, research projects, conferences and much more. On October 1, 2015 I was appointed Professor of Entrepreneurial Finance and Banking at the Open University in the Netherlands. I am currently also Associate Professor of Finance at the Maastricht University in the Netherlands and Professor Extraordinary at the University of Stellenbosch Business School in South Africa. I earned my doctorate at the University of Georgia in the USA in 1993.

My research focusses on retail banking, syndicated loans, project finance, banking geography, financial market linkages and integration and has been published in academic journals including the Journal of Financial Intermediation, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Financial Stability, Applied Economics, Journal of Banking and Finance, Financial Management and the Journal of International Money and Finance.

I received grants from the German Academic Exchange Service, Dutch Science Foundation and the European Credit Research Institute, consulted with the EU and the Center for European Policy Studies and taught graduate courses in 11 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. I am a member of the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Financial Economic Policy and of the editorial board of Applied Finance Letters, International Review of Financial Analysis, Finance Research Letters and Journal of Financial Economic Policy.        

New Working Paper

In our paper "Exporting Pollution", Itzhak Ben-David (Ohio State University), Michael Viehs (University of Oxford) and I present our latest research on the effects of environmental regulation on firms' carbon emission.

Despite awareness of the detrimental impact of CO2 pollution on the world climate, countries vary widely in how they design and enforce environmental laws. Using novel micro data about firms’ CO2 emissions levels in their home and foreign countries, we document firm behaviour that is in line with the Pollution Haven Hypothesis: Firms headquartered in countries with strict environmental policies perform their polluting activities abroad in countries with relatively weaker policies. These effects are stronger for firms in high-polluting industries and with poor corporate governance characteristics. Although firms export pollution, they nevertheless emit less overall CO2 globally in response to strict environmental policies at home.

Link to Paper

Forthcoming Publication              

A. Hoffmann, S. Kleimeier, N. Mimiruglu and J. Pennings, 2018, The American Inventors Protection Act: A Natural Experiment on Innovation Disclosure and the Cost of Debt, International Review of Finance, forthcoming.

This study examines the impact of innovation disclosure through patenting on firms’ cost of debt, focusing on the American Inventors Protection Act (AIPA) as an exogenous shock in innovation disclosure regulation. Post-AIPA, firms have an incentive to apply for patents only if commercial success is likely. Accordingly, we expect post-AIPA patents to be a better proxy for successful innovation activity, and thus to have a stronger effect on reducing the cost of debt than pre-AIPA patents. Indeed, we find that pre-AIPA patents reduce the cost of debt only for the most innovative firms, while post-AIPA this effect holds for all firms.

Link to Paper

New Working Paper

In our paper "Carbon Disclosure, Emission Levels, and the Cost of Debt", Michael Viehs (University of Oxford) and I present our latest research on the effect of carbon emission disclosure on corporations' costs of debt.

Using a unique and comprehensive database on carbon emissions from CDP (formerly 'The Carbon Disclosure Project'), we study whether companies which voluntarily participate in the CDP disclusure framework enjoy more favorable lending conditions - in the form of lower spreads on their bank loans - than their non-participating counterparts. Our empirical results reveal a significant and negative relation between disclosing carbon emission levels and the cost of bank loans. Regarding absolute emission levels, We find that firms disclosing relatively more carbon emissions pay higher spreads on their bank loans. These effects are common to all loans and not limited to loans which have been arranged by norms-constrained lenders suggesting that spread premia are driven by environmental risks rather than investor preferences.

Link to Paper