Oil price shocks and green bonds: An empirical evidence

This paper contributes to the existing literature by investigating the impacts of crude oil price shocks on financial markets through an examination of the effect of oil price shocks on the issuance of corporate green bonds. Green bond issuance has been growing fast over the past several years; despite this, the share of green bonds in the total bonds remains less than 1%. Using the multilevel models, this study investigates the effect of flow oil-supply, flow oil-demand, and speculative oil-demand shocks on (1) probability of the corporate green bond issuance and (2) the share of corporate green bond issuance. We find that flow supply shocks, flow demand shocks and the issuance of sovereign green bonds have a positive and significant effect on the probability of the issuance of corporate green bonds, but shocks have no significant impact on the share of the corporate green bond issuance. The results are robust to alternative specifications of our models.