气候风险对地方政府融资成本的影响

The Impact of Climate-Related Risk on Local Government Financing Costs

随着全球变暖,公众对气候变化的关注日趋加强,气候风险已经成为资产定价过程中无法忽略的重要因素。频发的气候灾害与环境政策不确定性使得地方政府债务融资条件雪上加霜。本文以城投债发行成本为视角,研究了气候风险对地方政府融资成本的影响。研究发现,气候风险显著增加了城投债的发行成本,导致地方政府融资成本上升,并且这种影响是气候物理风险和气候转型风险共同作用的结果。进一步分析发现,主动进行环境信息公开与获得较高外部评级能够削弱气候风险对地方政府融资的负面作用,这是由于降低了环境信息不对称与增强了市场对环境信息的验证作用。本文认为,城投债作为城市建设的重要资金来源,其资金用途通常具有高污染、高耗能的特点,气候风险对其发行成本的上升作用将进一步恶化地方政府债务负担,地方政府应当更加积极主动地公开环境信息以降低气候风险带来的影响。

With increasing public attention towards global warming and climate change,climate risk has become an important factor in asset pricing.Frequent climate disasters and climate policy uncertainty have landed local government debt financing in a dilemma.From the perspective of Chengtou bonds,we try to figure out the impact of climate risk on the financing cost of local governments.We find that climate risk significantly increases the issuance spread of Chengtou bonds,leading to the rise of local government financing costs,and this effect is the result of the joint action of climate physical risk and climate transition risk.Further analysis shows that voluntary environmental information disclosure and higher external ratings can weaken the negative effect of climate risk on local government financing.The main mechanism is that in this way information asymmetry would be relieved and the validation role of the market on environmental information would be enhanced.We believe that Chengtou bonds,which are important capital sources for urban construction,are always featured with high pollution and energy consumption.The increasingly severe effect of climate risk on their issuance costs will further worsen the implicit debt burden of local governments.Therefore,local governments should be more proactive in voluntary environmental information disclosure to cope with climate risk.