ESG criteria and the credit risk of corporate bond portfolios

André Höck, Michael Tobias Bauckloh, Maurice Dumrose and Christian Klein

No 23-03, CFR Working Papers from University of Cologne, Centre for Financial Research (CFR)

Abstract: Demand for sustainable fixed-income investment solutions is surging but there is hardly research on the impact of sustainability on the risk characteristics of fixed-income portfolios. This study examines the impact of sustainability on the credit risk exposure of U.S. corporate bond portfolios between 2013 and 2020 by analyzing the returns of sustainable and non-sustainable portfolios using two different asset pricing models and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings from different providers. Controlling for a set of portfolio characteristics, our results show that sustainable portfolios are significantly less exposed to credit risk than their non-sustainable peer portfolios. This finding implies that considering ESG criteria in portfolio management is a suitable means to systematically manage credit risk. Being the first study to investigate the relationship between sustainability and credit risk on portfolio level, this study contributes to the understanding of the effects of ESG criteria in portfolio management and provides academics and investment professionals with valuable insights.

Keywords: Sustainability; Credit risk management; Corporate bonds (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G12 G32 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cfn, nep-env, nep-fmk and nep-rmg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/274034/1/1855133164.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:cfrwps:2303

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CFR Working Papers from University of Cologne, Centre for Financial Research (CFR) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().