Green Bond Paper Topics, Journal Metrics and Post‐publication Diffusion
Paraic McGee, Tom Egan, Sheila O'DonohoeABSTRACT
Green bonds are important financial instruments in sustainable finance, generating a rapidly expanding academic literature. This paper identifies the topics analyzed in green bond academic research and examines how these topics are associated with journal and post‐publication diffusion metrics. Using 1048 paper abstracts published between 2015 and 2024, Latent Dirichlet Allocation identifies five topics: sustainable development finance, greenium, carbon emissions, market connectedness and issuer performance. Papers investigating the greenium, carbon emissions, market connectedness and issuer performance are associated with publication in higher impact factor journals and higher average academic citations. The greenium topic is also associated with higher policy and news citations, suggesting broader post‐publication diffusion beyond academia. In contrast, papers with an emphasis on sustainable development finance are associated with lower journal impact factors and lower post‐publication diffusion. The findings provide insights for researchers, policymakers and journal editors into how different topics of green bond research circulate across scholarly, policy and media domains.