We study whether and how a country's environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance relates to its sovereign borrowing costs in international capital markets. We hypothesize that good ESG performance plays an economic role: It signals a country's commitment to sustainability and long-term orientation and is a buffer against negative shocks, leading to lower sovereign bond yield spreads. Using a sample of 20 OECD countries over the period 1996–2012, we show that countries with good ESG performance are associated with lower default risk and lower sovereign bond yield spreads. Moreover, we show that the social and governance dimensions have a significant negative association with sovereign bond yield spreads, whereas the environmental dimension does not

The increasing societal focus on environmental issues leads to important questions about the relationship between corporate environmental (ESG) performance and firms’ cost of capital, but research on this topic remains scant. The real estate sector offers an ideal testing ground to investigate the relationship in two distinct manners, while specifically addressing concerns about endogeneity. We first investigate the spreads on commercial mortgages collateralized by real assets, some of which are environmentally certified. We then study spreads on corporate debt of property companies (REITs), both at issuance and while trading in the secondary market. The results show that loans on environmentally certified buildings command lower spreads than conventional, but otherwise comparable buildings, varying between 24 and 29 basis points, depending on the specification. At the corporate level, REITs with a higher fraction of environmentally certified buildings have lower bond spreads in the secondary market. These results are robust to different estimation strategies, and signal that environmental risk is efficiently priced in the real estate debt market