• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.45-60
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• 2020

Recently, ESG bond issuance has been gradually spreading to banks and non-financial private companies in Korea. However, the Korean ESG bond market is still in its infancy in terms of size, diversity and investor base compared to the global ESG bond market. In other words, ESG bonds are rapidly forming in the global market, but are still in the formation stage in the domestic market, and various policy and practical measures such as system, incentives, and infrastructure are needed to activate them. In this paper, we examine the domestic and international status of ESG bonds in relation to responsible investment. In addition, this paper explores specific measures to revitalize the domestic ESG bond market in four aspects: establishing ESG bond standards, procedures and regulations, increasing ESG bond investment demand, increasing ESG bond issuance, building market infrastructure and market efforts. This study is expected to contribute to the development of the domestic ESG bond market and responsible investment.

• Journal of Korean Society for Quality Management
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• v.51 no.2
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• pp.171-184
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• 2023

Purpose: First, this paper suggests an alternative approach to find optimal portfolio (stocks, bonds and ESG stocks) under the maximizing utility of investors. Second, we include ESG stocks in our optimal portfolio, and compare improvement of welfares in the case with and without ESG stocks in portfolio. Methods: Our main method of analysis follows Brennan et al(2002), designed under the continuous time framework. We assume that the dynamics of stock price follow the Geometric Brownian Motion (GBM) while the short rate have the Vasicek model. For the utility function of investors, we use the Power Utility Function, which commonly used in financial studies. The optimal portfolio and welfares are derived in the partial equilibrium. The parameters are estimated by using Kalman filter and ordinary least square method. Results: During the overall analysis period, the portfolio including ESG, did not show clear welfare improvement. In 2017, it has slightly exceeded this benchmark 1, showing the possibility of improvement, but the ESG stocks we selected have not strongly shown statistically significant welfare improvement results. This paper showed that the factors affecting optimal asset allocation and welfare improvement were different each other. We also found that the proportion of optimal asset allocation was affected by factors such as asset return, volatility, and inverse correlation between stocks and bonds, similar to traditional financial theory. Conclusion: The portfolio with ESG investment did not show significant results in welfare improvement is due to that 1) the KRX ESG Leaders 150 selected in our study is an index based on ESG integrated scores, which are designed to affect stability rather than profitability. And 2) Korea has a short history of ESG investment. During the limited analysis period, the performance of stock-related assets was inferior to bond assets at the time of the interest rate drop.