| Environmental protection industry is a strategic emerging industry that China focuses on cultivating.It is an important starting point for coordinating high-quality economic development and ecological environment protection.The environmental pollution marked by smog forced the government to speed up the introduction of environmental protection policies and further promoted the rapid development of environmental protection industry.Although policy factors have promoted a significant increase in social environmental protection investment,investment and financing problems are still an important bottleneck in environmental governance.On the one hand,the total investment level of China’s environmental protection funds is low;on the other hand,China’s environmental protection industry is dominated by small and medium-sized private enterprises with poor core financial indicators,which makes it more difficult for environmental protection enterprises to raise funds.Existing research lacks quantitative analysis of the role of informal mechanism in alleviating financing constraints of environmental protection enterprises in China.Based on this,this paper takes China’s A-share and New Third Board listed private environmental protection enterprises as samples from2012 to 2018,and uses the investment-cash flow sensitivity model to explore the influence of political connection on the financing constraints of China’s private environmental protection enterprises.The results show that political connection,as an informal mechanism,can play a significant role in alleviating the financing constraints of enterprises.Considering the hierarchy difference of political association,this paper assigns values according to the region where representative political association is located and the administrative level of official political association,and the research results are the same as above.In addition,this paper points out that because there are differences in political association types,their influence on financing constraints will be different.Therefore,the political association indicators of representative class and official class are further introduced into the model at the same time.The results show that only the political association of official class can significantly alleviate the financing constraints of environmental protection enterprises,while the representative class has no significant influence.This paper thinks that this is because resource effect plays a major role in this mechanism,and China’s environmental protection investment is more dependent on government investment.Among them,local investment is the main component.Enterprises with official political connections are more likely to get the inclination of financing policy,and have advantages in tax incentives,financial subsidies and information acquisition,thus effectively alleviating the financing difficulties of enterprises.While representative political association can enhance the reputation image of enterprises,it may not be able to effectively alleviate the financing constraints of enterprises.Finally,this paper intercepts the data from 2015 to 2018 as a sample,and finds that in recent years,the role of political connection in alleviating the financing constraints of environmental protection enterprises has been enhanced.This means that environmental protection enterprises can consider hiring people with political connections,especially officials,to serve as company executives or directors,so as to alleviate their financing constraints. |
