| The current global climate crisis is getting worse.The Chinese government has formulated a "dual carbon" target plan,which is committed to making China’s contribution to global environmental governance.At present,China has become the world’s largest energy consumer.This is mainly because China is the world’s second largest economy and has a large population.It can effectively ensure the smooth operation of the economy and the people’s daily life requires a lot of energy consumption.However,China’s energy efficiency has been low for a long time,resulting in waste of resources and a large amount of greenhouse gas emissions.As an innovative form of traditional financial models,green finance is an important policy tool to effectively improve energy efficiency by guiding funds to continue to flow to industries that utilize resources efficiently.Therefore,based on China’s national conditions,it is very important to carry out research on the impact mechanism of green finance on China’s energy efficiency,which is crucial for China to achieve energy conservation and emission reduction goals and green development.The main research content of this paper is to study the heterogeneity,nonlinear impact and impact mechanism of green finance on energy efficiency.Firstly,the domestic and foreign literatures on green finance and energy efficiency are reviewed,the theoretical mechanism of the impact of green finance on energy efficiency is summarized,and two transmission mechanisms of energy structure and green technology innovation are proposed.Secondly,using the data of 30 provinces from2010 to 2018,we measured the development of green finance and energy efficiency in each province.On this basis,the relationship between green finance and energy efficiency is studied by introducing the higher-order term of green finance into the fixed-effect model.And the panel threshold model is used to explore the non-linearity relationship between green finance and energy efficiency,and divided the data into resource-based and non-resource-based provinces for heterogeneity analysis.The panel quantile regression model and dynamic panel threshold models are used to further verify the non-linearity relationship between green finance and energy efficiency,and we also distinguish the energy efficiency of different industries for robustness testing;Finally,the moderating effect model is used to study the specific impact mechanism of green finance on energy efficiency.This paper finds that the development of green finance has a nonlinear impact on the improvement of energy efficiency in China.The impact of green finance on energy efficiency is different due to the different level of green finance,economic development and energy efficiency.Specifically:(1)The impact of green finance on energy efficiency has a single threshold effect with the different development level of green finance.When the level of green finance is lower than the threshold value(Gf≤0.176),the impact of green finance development on energy efficiency is significantly positive at the level of 1%,and when the level of green finance is higher than the threshold value(0.176<Gf),the impact of green finance development on energy efficiency is significantly positive at the level of 1%,but the coefficient is significantly smaller than when the level of green finance development is low.According to the heterogeneity analysis,we find that the above threshold effect also exists in non-resource-based provinces,but there is no threshold effect for resource-based provinces.(2)The impact of green finance on energy efficiency has a double-threshold effect with different level of economic development.When the level of economic development is low(GDP per capita ≤ 55610.9),the impact of green finance on energy efficiency is not significant.(55610.9<per capita GDP≤97370.0),the impact of green finance on energy efficiency is significantly positive at the level of 1%.When the level of economic development is further improved(97370.0<per capita GDP),the impact of green finance on energy efficiency is significantly positive at the level of 1%,and the influence coefficient is further enhanced.According to the heterogeneity analysis,we find that the above threshold effect also exists in non-resource-based provinces,but there is no threshold effect in resource-based provinces.(3)The robustness test that distinguishes energy efficiency in different industries also verifies the non-linearity of the impact of green finance development on China’s energy efficiency.And,we also found that when the energy efficiency is too high or too low,the impact of green finance on energy efficiency is not significant,only significant at the middle energy efficiency quantile,and the increase of energy efficiency facilitates this influence is gradually decreasing by using the panel quantile regression model.The empirical results of the dynamic panel threshold model considering endogeneity also verify the robustness of the conclusions of this paper.(4)In the process of improving energy efficiency by green finance,the energy structure with an excessively high proportion of coal will inhibit the improvement effect of green finance on energy efficiency;green technology innovation can effectively promote the improvement effect of green finance on energy efficiency. |
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