There is now increasing acceptance that the earth is warming up causing significant climate change which threatens to disrupt and cause significant loss of financial and human resources around the world.
As a response to this, both sovereign governments as well private companies have taken up the environmental challenge of finding cleaner and greener technology solutions that will help reduce the global warming. To achieve the 2 degrees Celsius threshold for global warming, nearly US$6.9 trillion will be required to be spent on improving the infrastructure over the next 15 years (OECD, 2017a). Emergence of the Green Bonds (a category of Climate bonds) as a major source to finance such initiatives has been one of the key developments in the global bond markets. Motivations for issuing green bonds are varied and range from improving market image by investing in green technology/initiatives (Turban and Greening, 1997), improving financial performance (Nilsson, 2008; Bauer and Smeets, 2015; Hartzmark and Sussman, 2018) and/or reducing risk (Krüger, 2015).
Green bonds are the debt instruments used by companies for financing environment friendly investments. The majority of the green bonds proceeds are earmarked for green projects but are backed by the issuer’s entire balance sheet. This proposed research will conduct empirical research in the three key areas related to the European green bond market. First, there is currently little or no research which investigates whether premium on the green bonds is affected by the use of proceeds.
The second key area of research which is largely unexplored is how the national culture/ environmental preferences affect the yield premium of green bonds.
The third and final part of this research will address how certification of green bond issuance affects yield premium. In the absence of regulations about what could be treated as a ‘green’ bond both in the US and the EU, certification from GBP and CBS could be an important source of information to pro-environmentalist investors. So the third and final part of this research will investigate how certification affects the pricing of green bonds.
Supervisors: Professor Sunil Poshakwale
Application Details: The PhD candidate should hold a minimum 2.1 class undergraduate degree in a related discipline and have passed, or be expected to have passed by autumn, a Master’s degree or equivalent research experience in a work setting. See admission and English language requirements.
Deadline: Expressions of interest alongside a CV are invited via email to sunil.poshakwale@cranfield.ac.uk
