Natural capital is related to government bonds through the macroeconomy and credit risks. This paper estimates this relationship from the long-term, between-country view and the short-term, within-country view. The paper cautions against the former, as it is dominated by income differences....

This paper proposes a new relative evaluation and benchmarking framework for performance linked financing instruments. It argues that the carrots and sticks of sustainability-linked bonds should not use key performance indicators which are solely tied to outcomes. Instead, they should be based...

The evolution of sustainable finance to mainstream finance has been motivated by a growing demand for the financial sector to play a greater role in the transformation of the current economic model into a more sustainable one. The introduction of the United Nation's (UN) Sustainable Development...

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing is quickly becoming ordre du jour in sovereign debt investing. There remains, however, lack of clarity around frameworks for scoring sovereign ESG performance, industry practices, and the definition of sustainability itself. This World Bank...

The increasing role of the financial sector in the move toward a more sustainable economic model continues apace. The Coronavirus (COVID-19) shock shone a light on the need for all society to correct course, and the financial sector is responding. The pace of environmental, social, and...

Globally, more than 130 million people are estimated to be in food crisis. These humanitarian disasters are associated with severe impacts on livelihoods that can reverse years of development gains. The existing outlooks of crisis-affected populations rely on expert assessment of evidence and...

Recent advances in food insecurity classification have made analytical approaches to predict and inform response to food crises possible. This paper develops a predictive, statistical framework to identify drivers of food insecurity risk with simulation capabilities for scenario analyses, risk...

This paper introduces a Spatial Vector Autoregressive Moving Average (SVARMA) model in which multiple cross-sectional time series are modeled as multivariate, possibly fat-tailed, spatial autoregressive ARMA processes. The estimation requires specifying the cross-sectional spillover channels...

This paper discusses both the relevance of economic and social rights (ESRs) for environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing in the sovereign debt asset class and how to start incorporating these rights into the investment process in a practical way. Many in the investment industry...