Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Green Bonds (but were afraid to ask)

This paper presents a comprehensive study of the ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) bond market which has experienced a dramatic expansion in the last few years and is about to gain an additional boost due to the forthcoming implementation of the Next Generation plan of the European Union. We use a security-by-security data set comprising a large sample of ESG bonds (15,500) exchanged on the main global security markets, integrated with microdata used in official statistics such as financial accounts and security holdings. First, we describe the most salient features of the global supply of ESG bonds by analyzing the characteristics of issuers and securities, the differences across countries and sectors, and their evolution over time. Second, we shed light on Italian residents' holdings of ESG bonds with a focus on sectoral holdings in the context of the financial accounts statistics