ESG report tone and bond spreads

IF 14.2 2区经济学 Q1 ECONOMICS

Energy Economics Pub Date : 2025-10-04 DOI:10.1016/j.eneco.2025.108955

Jin Zou , Li Gao , Jingzhou Yan , Yuan Liu

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Abstract

As global attention to sustainable development increases, the short-term market shocks associated with corporate ESG report information remain underexplored and warrant further attention. This paper develops a theoretical model and empirically examines the impact of ESG report tone on bond spreads using data from China’s credit bond market between 2008 and 2022. The results show that negative tones in ESG reports significantly widen bond spreads, reflecting the market’s sensitivity to management’s risk attitude. Further analysis reveals that the effect of negative tones is more pronounced when report quality is higher and market attention is greater. Additionally, long-term performance indicators, such as high ESG ratings and audit quality, help mitigate the short-term shocks caused by negative tones, while the effect of tone is amplified in a negative public sentiment environment. This study offers new insights into how corporate ESG information influences capital market pricing and provides policy recommendations for companies to optimize ESG risk management and enhance their disclosure frameworks.

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ESG报告基调和债券利差

随着全球对可持续发展的关注增加，与企业ESG报告信息相关的短期市场冲击仍未得到充分探讨，值得进一步关注。本文建立了理论模型，并利用2008年至2022年中国信用债券市场的数据，实证检验了ESG报告基调对债券利差的影响。结果显示，负面基调的ESG报告显著扩大了债券利差，反映了市场对管理层风险态度的敏感性。进一步分析发现，当报告质量越高、市场关注度越高时，负面语气的影响就越明显。此外，ESG高评级和审计质量等长期绩效指标有助于缓解负面基调带来的短期冲击，而负面基调的影响在负面的公众情绪环境中会被放大。本研究为企业ESG信息如何影响资本市场定价提供了新的见解，并为企业优化ESG风险管理和加强信息披露框架提供了政策建议。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Energy Economics ECONOMICS-

CiteScore

18.60

自引率

12.50%

发文量

524

期刊介绍： Energy Economics is a field journal that focuses on energy economics and energy finance. It covers various themes including the exploitation, conversion, and use of energy, markets for energy commodities and derivatives, regulation and taxation, forecasting, environment and climate, international trade, development, and monetary policy. The journal welcomes contributions that utilize diverse methods such as experiments, surveys, econometrics, decomposition, simulation models, equilibrium models, optimization models, and analytical models. It publishes a combination of papers employing different methods to explore a wide range of topics. The journal's replication policy encourages the submission of replication studies, wherein researchers reproduce and extend the key results of original studies while explaining any differences. Energy Economics is indexed and abstracted in several databases including Environmental Abstracts, Fuel and Energy Abstracts, Social Sciences Citation Index, GEOBASE, Social & Behavioral Sciences, Journal of Economic Literature, INSPEC, and more.