Does ESG Disclosure Affect Corporate-Bond Credit Spreads? Evidence from China
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear authors, I have read your article with interest. In order to improve it, I suggest indicating which tests you have done to adopting a panel with fixed effects
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We first thank you sincerely for giving some very helpful suggestions and comments to improve our manuscript. Our revisions have been made according to the questions and suggestions from you. The detail revisions are as follows:
Point 1: Dear authors, I have read your article with interest. In order to improve it, I suggest indicating which tests you have done to adopting a panel with fixed effects.
Response 1: To get a reasonable regression method, we conducted Hausman test before formal regression. The test results show that the original hypothesis (H0) is rejected significantly. Therefore, we rule out pooled OLS model and random effect model, and use fixed effect model. We report this in Section 4.2.1.
We promise that all authors agree to the final version, and the authors' names and affiliations are correct, and that funding sources are correctly acknowledged.
Thank you again for your suggestions.
Best regards,
Yuexiang Yang, Zhihui Du, Zhen Zhang, Guanqun Tong, Rongxi Zhou
Reviewer 2 Report
Thank you for the opportunity of reviewing your manuscript.
The topic is relevant and the paper, in general, is well written and has merit. The manuscript follows a logical structure. The hypotheses are well justified and hypothesized.
The paper, however, can be further improved as follows:
-The literature part could be enhanced, more relevant studies could be investigated
-There is no Discussion section, you should add
-section 5 could be renamed as Conclusions and implications. Limitations and further research suggestions could be added
All in all, the manuscript is good and can be published with some amendments.
Good luck!
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We first thank you sincerely for giving some very helpful suggestions and comments to improve our manuscript. Our revisions have been made according to the questions and suggestions from you. The detail revisions are as follows:
Point 1: The literature part could be enhanced, more relevant studies could be investigated.
Response 1: We enhanced the literature review and added some recent publications in this part.
Point 2: There is no Discussion section, you should add.
Response 2: We added the Discussion in Section 4.5.
Point 3: Section 5 could be renamed as Conclusions and implications. Limitations and further research suggestions could be added.
Response 3: We renamed Section 5 as Conclusions and implications and added limitations and further research suggestions accordingly.
Thank you again for your suggestions.
Best regards,
Yuexiang Yang, Zhihui Du, Zhen Zhang, Guanqun Tong, Rongxi Zhou
Reviewer 3 Report
The paper addresses an interesting and important topic of the relationship between ESG ratings and spreads of corporate bonds. The overall quality of the paper is high - the research problem was formulated correctly, review of the literature is sufficient, the research methods were selected in line with the paper's aim and the conclusions are well grounded in the conducted analysis. There are, however, some minor issues that should be revised.
- The paper could use more recent publications, in particular in the literature review.
- The conclusions should include in-depth comparisons to the results of the previous studies.
- Data source of the ESG ratings seems a bit unusual. I would recommend adding explanation of this source, in relation to the more established ones.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We first thank you sincerely for giving some very helpful suggestions and comments to improve our manuscript. Our revisions have been made according to the questions and suggestions from you. The detail revisions are as follows:
Point 1:The paper could use more recent publications, in particular in the literature review.
Response 1: We enhanced the literature review and added some recent publications in the literature review.
Point 2:The conclusions should include in-depth comparisons to the results of the previous studies.
Response 2: We added include in-depth comparisons to the results of the previous studies in the conclusion accordingly.
Point 3:Data source of the ESG ratings seems a bit unusual. I would recommend adding explanation of this source, in relation to the more established ones.
Response 3: We added some support information and elaborated the calculation method to demonstrate the reason for the data source.
Thank you again for your suggestions.
Best regards,
Yuexiang Yang, Zhihui Du, Zhen Zhang, Guanqun Tong, Rongxi Zhou
