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As the green bond market expands, an increasing number of Green Bond External Reviewers (hereafter 'GBER' or 'GBERs') have gained momentum among investors and financial regulators. A GBER enhances the credibility of green bonds and prevents greenwashing risk in the green bond market by reducing the information asymmetry between issuers and investors. China is the second largest issuer of green bonds in the world. The current Chinese GBER legal framework is insufficient to ensure green bond market sustainability. Our purpose in this paper is to analyze the inadequacies of the Chinese GBER regulatory framework and to provide suggestions for overcoming the potential challenges within it. A textual analysis of primary legal sources and secondary academic sources serves as the main research methodology in this study. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of China's GBER regulatory framework and addresses its shortcomings and weaknesses. Furthermore, given the evolving stage of the Chinese green bond market, this paper analyzes potential challenges for GBERs and proposes some suggestions to ensure high-quality reviews by GBERs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's bond market has been ranked third globally; however, China's corporate bonds are significantly less liquid than its stocks. Liquidity risk is an important component in China's corporate bond spreads. In this paper, we propose a stochastic liquidity discount factor model to evaluate the liquidity risk premium and its term structure in China's corporate bond market. The Monte Carlo simulation technique is used to quantify the impact on the liquidity premium of various liquidity factors: the liquidity level, liquidity volatility, liquidity shock, and the liquidity elasticity. Our findings conclude that the liquidity level is the most significant component of a liquidity premium. The impact on the liquidity premium of other liquidity factors is all conditional on the liquidity level. In addition, the impact of liquidity shocks and volatility is also subject to the market's equilibrium mechanism. Further, the term of a bond affects the premium both directly and indirectly through its influence on a bond's liquidity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As climate change impacts energy consumption, investments in clean energy are now associated with increased levels of risk and uncertainty. Consequently, the management of risk for clean energy investors has garnered significant academic attention. This study was designed to explore the risk transfers among clean energy markets, how they respond to market volatility, and how exceptional events impact the risk spillover. This was performed by examining the risk spillover of and asymmetric connectedness between clean energy markets, green bonds, and other financial markets in China, in line with the connectedness framework and minimum spanning tree technique. The findings revealed that clean energy markets exhibit heterogeneity in terms of the direction and magnitude of net risk spillover, the types of hedging assets involved, and their response to market volatility. Exceptional events, such as the Russian–Ukrainian conflict and COVID-19 pandemic, have an impact on the spillover relationships. During stable market conditions, green bonds experience fewer spillovers from clean energy markets, whereas, in times of volatility, gold markets are subjected to fewer spillovers. In the time domain, the overall long-term spillover is stronger compared to the short and medium terms. In the frequency domain, there is a significant risk of low-frequency transmission. These findings hold practical implications for energy investors in portfolio construction and for policymakers in pursuing sustainability objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Green bonds have increasingly been utilized around the world as a source of financing for renewable energy development, designed with compliance requirements and measurable economic returns to investors, while mitigating climate change. However, the efficacy of green bond arranged in the emerging economies for financing renewable energy assets and how the underlying risks are managed have remained to be explored. The paper aims to examine the evolving green financial system sponsored by both public and private institutions in managing such risks within China's emerging economy. A case study of green financing for a bundle of wind power assets led by a state-owned enterprise (SOE) reveals an alternative approach by structuring public–private collaboration while stipulating market-based financial incentives to institutional stakeholders under a political economy. This institutional consortium is composed of a state development bank, a commercial bank, credit rating agencies, institutional and private investors, regional power purchasers, and carbon trading entities. Financial stakeholders' risk in such emerging sustainable investment is moderated by these participating institutions and structured "upsides" from carbon trading aligned with the framework of green finance and standards for green bond development. The results reveal the potentials of scaling up the development of renewable energy by adequately managing and sharing key risks, while allocating substantial funding into renewable energy projects under such a green financial system that is to be complementary with a scalable post COVID-19 economic recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study utilizes the joint bond joint underwriting data of China's securities firms from 2011 to 2020 to systematically explore the evolutionary characteristics of China's collaborative bond joint underwriting networks from temporal, topological, and spatial dimensions. By employing social network analysis, Ucinet, and ArcGIS, we construct a longitudinal network panel data to quantitatively analyze the driving factors and their underlying mechanisms. The findings reveal that, in terms of topological structure, China's bond joint underwriting networks exhibit increasingly mature, active, balanced, and accessible features, with domestic securities firms such as China Securities Co., Ltd. emerging as the backbone and foreign-backed firms gradually fading. In the spatial dimension, urban collaboration presents a transformation from triangular to butterfly-shaped, quadrilateral, and ultimately multicore networks. At the regional scale, inter-regional collaboration is most extensive between the eastern regions, followed by eastern–central regions, with eastern–western and central–western regions relatively less engaged. At the urban scale, the central positions of Beijing, Shenzhen, and Shanghai are gradually strengthening, and their external radiation scope is expanding annually. The underlying mechanism driving this evolution is the increasing opportunities for securities firms to establish and adjust their cooperative relationships due to the maturing and active bond joint underwriting networks in China. To compensate for the opportunity cost of bond joint underwriting and to maximize collaboration benefits, securities firms need to select potential partners with close geographical proximity, similar business domains, larger underwriting scales, "friends of friends," and "network star" status, thereby promoting the continuous evolution of China's bond joint underwriting syndicates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]