A structural model for green bonds is developed to explain the formation and dynamics of green bond prices and to address the issue of the so-called ‘greenium’, that is, the difference between the yields on a conventional bond and a green bond with the same characteristics. We provide answers to the following questions: What are the determinants of the green bond value? Do green bonds enhance the credit quality of the issuer? Are green bonds a relatively cheap tool to fund sustainable investments? We also study the effect of investors' environmental concern on portfolio allocation. Our results have direct policy implications and suggest that an improvement in credit quality could ultimately lead to a lower cost of capital for green bond issuers and that governmental tax-based incentives and an increase in investors' green awareness play a significant role in scaling up the green bonds market.

An exact valuation formula for defaultable corporate coupon bonds is proved. The model incorporates discrete coupons, bankruptcy costs, taxes and the market risk generated by a stochastic risk-free structure. The aim of this paper is twofold: first, we generalise previous pricing models for corporate bonds; second, we provide a comprehensive formula in order to properly disentangle the contribution of several risk factors to credit spreads.Asset pricing, Coupon bonds, Credit risk, Debt valuation, Default risk, Structural models,

This paper addresses the following unresolved questions from the perspective of ambiguity theory: Why do some firms issue equity instead of debt? Why did most firms retain their cash holdings instead of distributing them as dividends in recent times? How do firms change their financing policies during a period of severe financial constraints and ambiguity, or when facing the threat of an unpredictable financial crisis? We analyze how the values of the firm's equity and debt are affected by ambiguity. We also show that cash holdings are retained longer if the investors' ambiguity aversion bias is sufficiently large, while cash holdings become less attractive when the combined impact of ambiguity and ambiguity aversion is relatively low.

An optimal weighting scheme is proposed to construct economic, political and financial risk indices in emerging markets using an approach that relies on consistent tests for stochastic dominance efficiency. These tests are considered for a given risk index with respect to all possible indices constructed from a set of individual risk factors. The test statistics and the estimators are computed using mixed integer programming methods. We derive an economic, political and financial risk ranking of emerging countries. Finally, an overall risk index is constructed. One main result is that the financial risk is the leading contributor to sovereign risk in emerging markets followed by the economic and political risk.JEL Classifications: C12; C13; C14; C15; G01

No abstract