We assess the degree of market fragmentation in the euro-area corporate bond market by disentangling the determinants of the risk premium paid on bonds at origination. By looking at over 2400 bonds we are able to isolate the country-specific effects which are a suitable indicator of the market fragmentation. We find that, after peaking during the sovereign debt crisis, fragmentation shrank in 2013 and receded to pre-crisis levels only in 2014. However, the low level of estimated market fragmentation is coupled with a still high heterogeneity in actual bond yields, challenging the consistency of the new equilibrium.

We analyse the effects of the Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP) launched by the ECB after the burst of the Covid-19 pandemic. The effects of the programme were different from the previous asset purchases. The PEPP significantly reduced the yield on bonds that at the same time were eligible to the programme and showed a green label. Via a triple difference estimator, we show that this effect is additional to the outperformance of greens vs non-green bonds that also occurred in the set of non-eligible bonds. All in all, the estimated impact stands at 51 basis points, a value that is significant also from an economic point of view: around 20 per cent of the cost of issuing a bond. From a climate change perspective, this evidence suggests that asset purchase programmes are an effective way of supporting firms financing climate-friendly investments on the bond market. In addition, we find that the issuers that benefitted most from the PEPP improved their ESG performance to a larger extent than other issuers.

We assess the impact of the corporate sector purchase programme (CSPP), the corporate arm of the ECB's quantitative easing, over its first year of activity (June 2016 – June 2017). Focusing on the primary bond market, we find evidence of a significant impact of the CSPP on yield spreads, both directly on purchased and targeted bonds and indirectly on all other bonds. The magnitude and the timing of the changes in yield spreads, coupled with the evolution of bond placements, are fully consistent with the proper unfolding the portfolio rebalancing channel.

We propose a model with mean-variance foreign investors who exhibit a convex disutility associated to brown bond holdings. The model predicts that bond green premia should be smaller in economies with more closed financial accounts and highly volatile exchange rates. This happens because foreign intermediaries invest relatively less in such economies, and this lowers the marginal disutility of investing in polluting activities. We find strong empirical evidence in favor of this hypothesis using a global bond market dataset. Exchange rate volatility and financial account openness are thus able to explain the higher financing costs of green projects in emerging markets relative to advanced economies, especially when green bonds are denominated in local currency: a disadvantage that we can call the “green sin” of emerging economies.