当前位置: X-MOL 学术The British Accounting Review › 论文详情
Our official English website, www.x-mol.net, welcomes your feedback! (Note: you will need to create a separate account there.)
What’s in a shade? The market relevance of green bonds’ external reviews
The British Accounting Review ( IF 5.5 ) Pub Date : 2023-10-28 , DOI: 10.1016/j.bar.2023.101271
Marco Ghitti , Gianfranco Gianfrate , Florencio López de Silanes , Marco Spinelli

With the growth of green bonds as an asset class, the certification of the actual climate footprint of projects financed with these bonds is gaining momentum among investors and policymakers. We investigate the informative content of Second Party Opinions (SPOs) issued by external reviewers to assess the quality of green bonds collecting a global sample of over 1200 corporate green bonds and matching results for 336 of those. We show that the market assigns a premium to the bonds with the best SPOs' valuation - namely, the “dark-” and “medium-” green bonds. However, in presence of a formal credit rating, the external reviews do not appear to incorporate distinctive information priced by the market. Using a difference-in-difference approach, we find that stricter green investment regulations like the adoption of the “EU Taxonomy” produce a “fly-to-quality” effect that widens the spread between dark and lighter green bonds' returns. Responsible investors do appear to rely on the judgement of external reviewers when a formal credit rating is absent, and they have significantly higher stakes in the greener bonds. Overall, our results indicate that external reviews can reduce the information asymmetry between issuers and investors when a credit rating is lacking, but they are not informative for rated green bonds.



中文翻译:

树荫下有什么?绿色债券外部审查的市场相关性

随着绿色债券作为一种资产类别的发展,对这些债券融资项目的实际气候足迹的认证正在受到投资者和政策制定者的青睐。我们调查了外部评审员发布的第二方意见 (SPO) 的信息内容,以评估绿色债券的质量,收集了全球超过 1200 只企业绿色债券的样本以及其中 336 只的匹配结果。我们表明,市场为具有最佳 SPO 估值的债券(即“深色”和“中度”绿色债券)分配了溢价。然而,在存在正式信用评级的情况下,外部审查似乎并未纳入市场定价的独特信息。采用倍差法,我们发现更严格的绿色投资法规(例如采用“欧盟分类法”)会产生“飞向质量”效应,扩大深色和浅色绿色债券回报之间的差距。在没有正式信用评级的情况下,负责任的投资者似乎确实依赖外部审查者的判断,并且他们在绿色债券中的持股比例要高得多。总体而言,我们的结果表明,当缺乏信用评级时,外部审查可以减少发行人和投资者之间的信息不对称,但对于评级绿色债券来说并不能提供信息。

更新日期:2023-10-30
down
wechat
bug