Institutional Pressures On The Integration Of Corporate Environmental Performance And Financial Performance

With the successive promulgation of a series of environmental laws and regulations,the concept of green development has been further promoted,and the construction of ecological civilization has reached a new height in China.However,this has also plunged enterprises into a new dilemma of coping with the dual pressures of environmental protection and economic development.How to improve the protection of the ecological environment while the company is pursuing economic development,and how to achieve the goal of economic growth while the company is pursuing environmental protection,has become a practical problem that needs to be solved urgently.This article believes that,different from the traditional concept of sustainable development,seeking the coordinated development of environmental performance and financial performance is a new way for contemporary enterprises to achieve sustainable development.Based on the above background,this article puts forward the concept of the integration of corporate environmental performance and financial performance based on classical theories such as environmental externality theory,ecological economic theory,symbiosis theory and sustainable development theory.Through content analysis method,benchmarking company fitting,threshold method,analytic hierarchy process,expert scoring method,coefficient of variation method and other methods,this article constructs a specific measurement method of environmental financial integration-Environmental Financial Index,which consists of environmental legality index,environmental communication index,environmental management index,green management index and financial level index.Through the basic analysis of the Environmental Financial Index,this article finds that in the pursuit of a win-win situation between economic development and environmental protection,the performance of Chinese heavy polluting enterprises is not ideal.Enterprises usually focus on financial or environmental output,but ignore the top-level structure of environmental protection.Moreover,the performance of environmental and financial integration of enterprises in different industries and different regions also shows great differences.At the industry level,this article believes that the differences between industries may be caused by the different strengths of environmental inspections or social supervision in different industries.At the regional level,different levels of environmental financial integration may be affected by the inherent characteristics of regional traditional industries.This also inspires ideas for the follow-up research of this article.Therefore,this article believes that exploring the specific motivations behind the corporate environmental financial integration and its impact mechanism is the first step for companies to get out of the "sustainable development dilemma".Based on institutional theory and stakeholder theory,this article divides the institutional pressures that companies face into coercive pressures,normative pressures and mimetic pressures,and explores their impact on corporate environmental financial integration.The main results are as follows.First,coercive pressure mainly comes from the government’s policy formulation.Both command-and-control regulations and market-based regulations can improve the environmental and financial integration of enterprises.But unlike the command-and-control regulations whose main goal is environmental protection,market-based regulations are more conducive to increasing the freedom of corporate behavior and decision-making.Moreover,appropriate economic Compensation can help companies ease the economic pressure of environmental protection,and ultimately improve the integration of environmental performance and financial performance.And the effects of different types of command-andcontrol regulations will also show differences.In addition,based on the differences in regional economic development in my country,this article finds that companies in the eastern region are more sensitive to command-and-control regulations,while companies in the central and western regions may prefer market-based regulations due to economic development constraints.Second,the normative pressure mainly from the public has a traction effect on corporate environmental and financial integration.Companies adopting the rational green requirements of consumers,the public and other stakeholders are conducive to obtaining additional social resources.The specific manifestation is to improve the degree of corporate environmental financial integration.And the degree of marketization will promote the above-mentioned relationship.Therefore,the government should not only improve the formulation of relevant policies,but also pay attention to the role of market orientation on enterprises.Third,based on the hypothesis of learning behavior and the hypothesis of manager’s reputation,there will be mimetic pressures within companies to imitate other companies.This mimetic pressure will cause the corporate environment and financial integration to have a peer effect.The main form is to imitate leader companies,rather than following the crowd or following the pandemic.Moreover,there is asymmetry in the direction of imitating the changes in the environmental financial integration of peer companies.The effect of simultaneous reduction will be stronger than the effect of simultaneous increase.This may be because simultaneous reduction can alleviate the sense of guilt of irrational behavior of enterprises,while simultaneous improvement will be difficult to achieve due to the difficulty of imitation.Fourth,this article finds that the above-mentioned influences will show certain differences among enterprises with different ownership,different types of executives,different industries,and different regions.Finally,combined with the above research results,this article puts forward relevant suggestions from three aspects:government policy formulation,market-oriented mechanism and corporate strategic management.In summary,theoretically,this article reveals the phenomenon of corporate environmental financial integration and explains the mechanism of integration.Through an in-depth analysis of the interaction between corporate environmental performance and financial performance,this article reaffirms the symbiosis between the two,which is both contradictory and unified,and dual dependent.In practice,the environmental financial index constructed in this article combined with existing research will raise the position of environmental protection and resource allocation to the top of the entire enterprise operation process,which is conducive to the formation of sustainable development strategies for enterprises.And this article analyzes the impact of multidimensional institutional pressure on corporate environmental financial integration in the corporate social network relationship,and provides certain data support for government policy formulation,corporate strategic management and related academic research.