Hybrid bonds and electric vehicle stock: Quantile-on-Quantile evidence from leading EV economies

Abstract

Hybrid bonds, which combine debt and equity features, provide flexible long-term financing for capital-intensive electric vehicle activities. This study examines the asymmetric association between hybrid bond issuance and electric vehicle stock across ten leading economies: the USA, China, Germany, Japan, the UK, France, Canada, South Korea, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Unlike earlier studies that mainly focus on subsidies, incentives, green bonds, and charging-infrastructure finance, this study treats hybrid bonds as an underexplored sustainable-finance indicator associated with electric vehicle stock. Using the Quantile-on-Quantile approach, the analysis captures country-specific and quantile-level variations in the association between hybrid bonds and electric vehicle stock across different financial and electric-mobility conditions. The results show positive associations in several middle and upper quantile regions, particularly where capital markets, electric vehicle ecosystems, and sustainable-finance conditions are more developed. However, weak or inverse associations appear in some lower-tail regions, suggesting that hybrid bond issuance does not automatically coincide with electric vehicle stock expansion when market and infrastructure conditions are less mature. Overall, the findings indicate that hybrid bonds are part of a broader sustainable-finance environment associated with electric vehicle stock, while the results are interpreted as conditional associations rather than causal evidence.