I have worked in and around the convertible bond market for most of my twenty-five-year career. The questions in this stream come from that deep product experience, seen through the vantage point of origination and structuring, sales and sales-trading, and research. This research stream covers the factors driving the market's structure and size, capital flow dynamics and relative value analysis.
Corporates that issue bonds generally refinance them with new bonds at maturity, so corporate bonds hold a permanent place on balance sheets. Convertibles usually do not. Most issuers treat them as a temporary transition to equity or as opportunistic, one-off financing, and the few repeat issuers are the exceptions. In that mindset a convertible is designed to convert into shares or to be paid off, never to be rolled into a new convertible. Yet in practice a convertible may or may not convert, and meanwhile it carries a lower coupon than the equivalent straight debt. Security-choice planning fixes on conversion and dilution and rarely treats the conversion option for what it also is: a mechanism that synthetically suppresses the interest expense. Accounting rules can certainly direct issuer minds towards viewing convertibles as a cheap-debt alternative or a dilutive instrument. Under US GAAP, a standard convertible bond is generally treated entirely as debt until conversion, keeping the focus on its low coupon cost. Conversely, under IFRS (used in Europe and elsewhere), issuers must use bifurcation from day one, splitting the instrument into a liability component and an equity component. Yet, even in the US, corporate CFOs and treasurers overwhelmingly view convertible bonds as a tactical, opportunistic financing tool or a “bridge to equity” (“backdoor equity” mindset) and not as permanent capital to keep on the balance sheet. This suggests other factors may be at play, some structural, others psychological, which are preventing wider adoption of this asset class by corporates.
The question is whether convertibles could establish a permanent place on a corporate's balance sheet, and if so what a pathway to permanent capital status would require. It is stated here at the level of framing. The approach will follow in the review programme below.
Review programme
What we know and do not know about convertible bonds: a review of the literature since 2014
The last broad surveys of the convertible literature that I have found date from 2014: one on issuance motives and design, one on pricing. Both predate the 2020–21 issuance boom, the 2020 change in US accounting for convertibles (effective 2022), and the issuance surge of 2025–26. I have not found a broad review of convertibles published since, and checking this is the review’s first step. The review will update those surveys on a stated protocol: a defined search across named databases and working-paper series, explicit inclusion rules, and a published count of what was found and what was kept.
Grey literature is included under a rule of its own. Academic reviews of this market leave out bank research, investor papers, index methodologies and vendor papers, and much of the market’s working knowledge sits there. The review will state which of this material qualifies and why.
The protocol will be deposited with a DOI before the search begins. The map of what remains under- or unexplored will be published with the review.
Focused reviews
To followFirst set out October 2026
The broad review will be followed by shorter reviews, each on one specific question about the asset class: the permanent-capital question above, and other questions that the gap map leaves open. Each will have its own protocol and its own dated record. Further questions will be stated here as each protocol is deposited.
2. Nature and climate adaptation
This stream asks two linked questions about nature-based climate adaptation in small island states. The first: why are mangrove wetlands still lost when their carbon and flood-protection value is high, and what finance and governance would change that? The completed Cayman Islands study below answers for one jurisdiction. The second follows from it: how do the property, insurance and credit markets of a small, low-elevation, high-income island price sea-level rise and storm risk, a long-run and possibly terminal physical risk, and ultimately the persistence of the island itself? Such islands face that risk with no hinterland, no insurer of last resort and no collective exit. The five-island programme asks the question comparatively, against a selected control basket.
Completed
Carbon stocks and conservation funding in the Cayman Islands
CompletedPreprint on SSRN, October 2026To be presented at the Research showcase, Energy & Environment seminar series, University of Cambridge, 7 December 2026
The study set out to price the carbon held in the Central Mangrove Wetland of Grand Cayman and to ask whether that price could fund the wetland's conservation. It found that it could not, at current carbon prices, and that the reason lay beyond the carbon market. Nothing in Cayman's markets priced the persistence of the jurisdiction itself. The question behind the study is the one that runs through this stream: why the wetland is still being lost when its carbon and flood-protection value is high, and what finance and governance would change that. Permanence buffers sat at their floor. The highest land values were in the western districts that Hurricane Ivan flooded in 2004. Property insurance was close to the limit of insurability.
The paper introduces the term LESIS, low-elevation small island states, for the class of island the Cayman case belongs to, and treats the funding gap as a problem in the political economy of climate adaptation rather than in carbon accounting alone.
Full text: see Publications. The study drew on interviews whose participants remain anonymous in every published version.
Work in progress
Pricing terminal risk: the political economy of climate adaptation in five mini Earths
A mini Earth is a small, low-elevation, high-income island whose population is stuck: self-governing, with no hinterland, no insurer of last resort and no collective exit, facing sea-level rise and hurricanes. The term is an analogy. The Earth as a whole has no hinterland, no insurer of last resort and no exit, and its developed economies carry deep markets that are expected to price long-run risk. A mini Earth reproduces those conditions within one jurisdiction, over decades, where the risk is real, the exposure is total and the markets exist to price it.
Each part of the definition excludes a group of islands. Low elevation rules out the hilly Caribbean states, which have high ground to retreat to. Self-government with no backstop rules out islands with a mainland behind them, whose prices carry that backstop. Hurricanes rule out low islands outside the storm belts, such as Singapore, Bahrain and the Maldives, which face sea-level rise alone and without the events that reprice insurance and property. High income is the filter that makes the study possible: deep property, insurance and credit markets, mortgageable tenure, rated or traded sovereign credit and published statistics, so that a failure to price the hazard is a verdict by markets that could have priced it. In the atoll states, prices are shadow prices set by donors and geopolitics. Those states show how societies adapt and negotiate exit. The high-income islands show whether markets price that end-state, and what a backstop is worth.
By those filters I count five: the Bahamas, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, the Turks and Caicos Islands and Anguilla. The list is a count under a stated definition, and the Maldives sits closest to the line, on income. The five feel the effects of climate change sooner than continental economies, and they reveal a price that mainland backstops hide. That potentially makes them canaries for the developed world, and a contingent liability for the governments that stand behind them.
Terminal risk, as used here, is the hazard of ruin: the chance in any given year that the island stops persisting as a self-governing economy and a home for its people, as distinct from damage that is repaired and paid for. The programme asks what that hazard is for each island, whether the island's own property, insurance and credit markets price it, and how that pricing compares with a selected control basket of economies that have a hinterland and a backstop.
I did not find a published paper that assembles property and hurricane repricing for any of the five islands, or that treats them as a class. The programme proceeds in stages: a position paper in late 2026, a first result from public data, then the comparison across the five islands and the control basket.
This note extends the Cayman study above. It uses no interview material.