“…highlight that crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, are sources of exogenous shocks that are employed as quasi-natural experiments to help address both existing and new research questions. From this perspective we also contribute to the strand of the literature that examined the impact of the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic on various outcomes such as bank regulation (Duncan et al, 2022;Bitar and Tarazi, 2022;Dursunde Neef et al, 2023), governmental support Pancotto et al, 2023;Degryse and Huylebroek, 2023), lending (Dursun-de Neef and Schandlbauer, 2021;Park and Shin, 2021), non-performing loans (Ari et al, 2021), performance (Demirgüç-Kunt et al, 2021) and systemic risk (Duan et al, 2021;Borri and di Giorgio), 2021, among others. Relatedly, the sudden emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, which had a devastating impact on the world economy, has provided a rare opportunity to explore whether banks' and other financial intermediaries' efforts to be more responsible are valued by the investors and financial markets.…”