ABSTRACT
China is promoting carbon neutrality to cope with environmental degradation and economic loss, issuing more green bonds than any other country to finance its green transformation. Uncertainty affects green bonds more than traditional bonds, including policy uncertainty, natural disasters, and energy crises. This chapter advocates green bond underlying volatility swaps, a derivative that allows investors to trade green bond price volatility, which market participants can use for hedging. We propose a framework for forecasting realized volatility by demonstrating that Chinese green bonds are highly homogeneous, making them useful in such forecasting and thus guiding trading in such swaps. We also examine the forecasting performance of a novel model, RVNET-GARCH, which synthesizes multiple green bonds’ historical realized volatility into a network factor. Testing for robustness with three Monte Carlo simulations and six rolling horizons shows that the proposed methodology can provide reliable results.
