THE GREENIUM EFFECT IN THE CORPORATE BOND MARKET OF EU COUNTRIES

The article examined the effect of the green premium (greenium) on the corporate bond market of the European Union countries. The relevance of the work is due to the need for empirical evidence of the existence of this award in the context of heterogeneous methodological approaches to its assessment and the increasing role of sustainable financing in the context of the transition to a low-carbon economy. The aim of the work is to identify and quantify the effect for corporate bonds issued by Germany, Spain and the Netherlands, taking into account national macroeconomic specifics and industry specifics of issuers. The research methodology includes the formation of a sample of pairs of comparable instruments, a comparative analysis of profitability and liquidity, an assessment of correlation dependencies and the construction of regression models taking into account macroeconomic indicators and market indicators. The results show that the most significant and statistically significant decrease in yields was found for Spanish issuers, while the effect was statistically less significant for German and Dutch bonds. Regression analysis confirmed the significant impact on profitability of traditional macroeconomic factors, including the inflation rate and the risk-free rate. There was also a statistically significant negative impact of inflation and a positive impact of the risk-free rate on the yield of Spanish green bonds, and the sensitivity to inflation turned out to be significantly higher. The quality of the constructed models was high, as evidenced by the coefficients of determination (R2) at the level of 0.82 for classic Spanish bonds and 0.86 for green bonds of Germany and the Netherlands. The results obtained emphasize the importance of taking into account national specificities when developing investment strategies and shaping public policy for the transition to sustainable development. The practical significance lies in the possibility of using the research results for a deeper analysis and development of a methodology for assessing sustainable financial instruments.