Case studies’ evidence of greenium in green bond sovereign issuances during the pandemic selloff of March 2020.

Achieving the SDG goals will require enormous financing efforts from governments and the private sector. Green bonds have been emerging as a useful tool to help finance the gap for SDGs and have been expected to deliver some financial advantages. Nevertheless, there has not been strong evidence of this. This research finds initial evidence of a possible financial advantage for issuers. That is, green bonds’ issuances yields spiked lower during the Covid19 selloff versus their non-green comparables. There are several potential explanations for this and not enough data to point at one but this paper explores investor composition as a potential factor and finds some evidence of different investor behavior