What do sovereign debt, municipal bonds and stock returns have in common? According to Eline ten Bosch’s PhD dissertation, it’s more than we may think, especially when sustainability and water stress enter the picture.
On 12 February 2026, ten Bosch defended her dissertation, Pricing the Unseen: Sustainability, Water Stress and Global Financial Markets, at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM). Her research brings together sustainability, finance and data innovation to explore how environmental and social risks are being reflected in financial markets.
At the heart of the dissertation lies a powerful question: are some of the biggest risks in financial markets invisible? Ten Bosch provides evidence that sustainability performance can matter for sovereign default risk, that water stress may affect borrowing costs in US municipal bond markets, and that water use and water stress are becoming relevant factors in global equity markets. Taken together, these points in her dissertation offer a fresh and timely perspective on the relation between sustainability and three major asset classes: sovereign bonds, US municipal bonds and equities.
The work was completed under the supervision of Professor Mathijs van Dijk and Professor Dirk Schoenmaker and reflects years of research at the intersection of sustainable finance and real-world environmental pressure. In her dissertation, ten Bosch combines financial analysis with sustainability metrics and novel satellite-based data, helping to make complex and often overlooked risks more visible to investors, policymakers and researchers alike.
This research speaks directly to the growing need to better understand how sustainability challenges translate into economic and financial outcomes. By showing how issues such as water stress and sustainable development are not peripheral concerns, but increasingly material factors, ten Bosch’s dissertation underlines the importance of connecting academic insight with real-world decision-making.
It is exactly this kind of research that helps advance the transition toward more sustainable value creation.