Influence Of Green Credit Policy On Investment Expenditure Of Heavily Polluting Enterprises

In recent years,environmental pollution incidents occur frequently and environmental quality shows a downward trend.The 19 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China listed the prevention and control of environmental pollution as one of the "three key battles".How to deal with the relationship between environment and development and improve the quality of economic growth is the core issue of China’s development in the future.Although heavily polluting enterprises have made contributions to China’s economic development,as the main manufacturer of environmental pollution,their extensive growth concept has brought serious problems of expansion,resulting in the continuous deterioration of the ecological environment.Under the traditional bank development model,heavily polluting enterprises are capital intensive industries and need to rely on sustained financing.They become the main recipients of credit resources with heavily mortgaged assets.In the long run,financial funds are concentrated in industries with high profits,high energy consumption and high pollution,and the degree of financial mismatch is improved.Rich cash flow and the high growth concept of becoming stronger stimulate enterprise managers to engage in more expansionary investment behavior under opportunistic motivation.Therefore,how to curb the excessive development of heavy polluting enterprises and balance the relationship between development and environmental governance has become an urgent problem for the government.The policy of green credit guidelines issued by the former CBRC in 2012 is an important measure to promote green finance in China.The purpose is to guide funds from heavy polluting industries to energy conservation industries and force heavy polluting industries to achieve high-quality development.The guidelines want to promote energy conservation,emission reduction and improve environmental quality.In theory,the green credit policy can control the capital acquisition of heavy pollution industries from the source,reduce the investment level of enterprises,slow down their development speed and improve the efficiency of pollution control.In fact,what impact will the introduction of green credit policy have on the investment level of heavily polluting enterprises? Can it alleviate the current dilemma of sustained and rapid development of heavy polluting enterprises? If there are the above effects,through what channels does green credit play a role in the investment level of enterprises? Is there any difference in the impact of green credit on enterprise investment level under different economic scenarios? Answering these questions will not only help to further explore the important factors affecting enterprise over investment from the macro policy level and deeply understand the theoretical logic of "macro-economic policy micro enterprise behavior",but also provide a theoretical reference for green credit policy to serve the real economy.From the perspective of financing constraints,testing the mechanism of the impact of green credit policy.Further,analysing the internal mechanism of energy conservation and emission reduction of heavy polluting enterprises,confirming the passive emission reduction caused by the "crowding out effect" of investment.The empirical results show that:（1）the green credit policy reduces the overall investment level of heavy polluting enterprises and alleviates their excessive development trend.（2）Compared with non-state-owned enterprises,small-scale enterprises and enterprises with low debt repayment risk,the inhibitory effect of green credit policy on enterprise investment level is more significant in state-owned enterprises,large-scale enterprises and enterprises with high financial risk.（3）The mechanism test shows that green credit affects the investment level of enterprises by improving the financing constraints of heavily polluting enterprises.（4）Further research found that the introduction of green credit policy will have a negative impact on the business behavior of enterprises,resulting in mandatory passive emission reduction.But it will not strengthen the enterprises to reduce emission behavior through active transformation and upgrading.Overall,the introduction of green credit policy can alleviate the expansion of heavily polluting enterprises and reduce pollution emissions.However,enterprises are more passive in taking emission reduction measures under the conditions of reduced investment and reduced financing capacity.At the same time,from the perspective of financing channels,there is still a possibility of policy arbitrage.Whether the enterprise emission reduction behavior brought by the green credit forced mechanism is sustainable deserves further attention.