Capital Constraints,Green Finance And Enterprise Environmental Protection Investment Behavior

With the rapid advancement of industrialization process,China’s economy has experienced high-speed growth,but also produced a series of environmental pollution problems,putting unprecedented pressure on the ecological environment.Environmental protection has become a common appeal of contemporary society,and the key to realize this appeal is the investment of environmental protection funds.The Chinese government has continuously increased its financial investment in environmental protection,but the problem of environmental pollution has not been fundamentally solved.Obviously,the realization of environmental protection can not only rely on the government,but should actively promote the initiative and enthusiasm of enterprises in environmental protection,especially guiding heavy polluting enterprises to invest in environmental protection according to the principle of "whoever pollutes,whoever cleans up." Data shows that from September 2020 to September 2021,A-share listed companies received a total of 2,000 environmental protection penalties,with administrative penalties totaling nearly 300 million yuan.In a year,listed companies have received so many environmental penalties,We can not help but wonder what factors limit companies from taking on environmental responsibilities.Is it due to the lack of funds? Green finance,which is closely related to the capital situation of enterprises,aims to guide the environmental investment behavior of enterprises by internalizing the pollution cost of enterprises through economic leverage.Can this external green financial support effectively resolve the contradiction between the capital constraint and environmental protection investment of heavy polluting enterprises?In order to further explore,this paper takes the listed companies in the heavy pollution industry from 2010 to 2020 as the research sample,and Using a multiple linear regression model empirically tests the relationship between capital constraint and enterprise environmental protection investment behavior based on the cost-benefit theory,legitimacy theory,financing constraint theory and reputation theory.The study found that: first of all,the degree of capital constraint is positively correlated with the enterprise environmental protection investment,that is,the higher the degree of capital constraint,the more the enterprise environmental protection investment.Secondly,the test of regulation effect shows that green finance will strengthen the positive correlation between capital constraints and enterprises’ environmental protection investment.The results show that the capital constraint is not the main limiting factor for the poor environmental governance of enterprises.In order to obtain the green financial credit,enterprises with capital constraints will increase the environmental protection investment to ease the capital constraints they face.After a series of robustness tests and endogenous tests,such as the measure of replacement explanatory variables,one stage lag of explanatory variables,changing sample interval,and replacement control variables,the test results are basically consistent with the above conclusions.Finally,by grouping the sample,the differentiated effects of capital constraints on environmental protection investment behaviors of enterprises with different property rights,different life cycle and different environmental protection pressures are compared and analyzed.It is found that in non-state-owned enterprises,growing enterprises and enterprises with high environmental protection pressure,capital constraints play a greater role in promoting environmental protection investment of enterprises.This study theoretically broadens the research perspective of enterprise pollution prevention and control,and expands the research on the internal motivation of enterprise environmental protection investment.In a practical sense,it breaks the long-standing argument that companies cannot increase environmental investment due to lack of money,and helps the state rationally adjust financial policies to guide enterprises to carry out environmental governance,and provides a basis for the government to guide companies to strengthen environmental governance in a targeted way,thereby achieving the transition from high-speed development to green and high-quality development,and promoting the achievement of the carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals.