CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Alonso Vega, Silvia Isabel |
|---|---|
| Title | Financing the Transition: Empirical Evidence on Green Bonds and Sustainable Innovation in the European Union???s Utilities Sector |
| Summary | Green bonds have emerged as a powerful financing tool for the green transition. By easing capital constraints and steering firms toward green R&D, they can accelerate the development of climate mitigation and adaptation technologies. Yet most existing studies rely on cross-sectoral Chinese data, leaving sector and region specific dynamics unexplored. This paper addresses that gap by examining the effect of green-bond issuance on green innovation, proxied by green patents, using an annual panel of utilities firms domiciled in the European Union (EU) from December 2015 through May 2025. The core empirical strategy employs one-to-one nearest-neighbor propensity-score matching (PSM) to construct a credible counterfactual and more precisely isolate the causal impact of green bonds on technological innovation. The study finds that the effect of green bonds is context-dependent. Issuance spurs innovation in Austrian utilities but is associated with lower patenting probability and application counts in Denmark and Italy, particularly within electric utilities firms. Overall, the effects underscore the role of regulatory and institutional environments as well as industry-level dynamics in shaping the innovation outputs of utilities firms in the EU. |
| Supervisor | Schindele, Ibolya |
| Department | Economics MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/alonso-vega_silvia.pdf |
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