This paper examines whether a premium for green bonds, called “greenium”, found in previous studies, exists in primary and secondary bond markets. Using a universe of about 2000 green and 180,000 non-green bonds from 650 international issuers, we apply both propensity score matching and coarsened exact matching to determine a sample of conventional bonds that is most similar to the sample of green bonds. We find that green bonds have larger issue sizes and lower rated issuers, on average, compared to conventional bonds. The estimates show that the yield for green bonds is, on average, 15–20 basis points lower than that of conventional bonds, both on primary and secondary markets, thus a “greenium” exists.

本文研究了在先前研究中发现的绿色债券溢价（称为“绿皮”）是否存在于一级和二级债券市场中。我们使用来自650个国际发行人的大约2000枚绿色和180,000份非绿色债券的整体，应用倾向得分匹配和粗化精确匹配来确定与绿色债券样本最相似的常规债券样本。我们发现，与传统债券相比，绿色债券平均具有更大的发行规模和更低的评级发行人。估算显示，在一级市场和二级市场上，绿色债券的收益率平均比传统债券低15-20个基点，因此存在“绿皮书”。