Research On The Impact Of Green Credit Policy On Enterprise Green Innovation

Along with Chinese urbanization and the rapid development of industrialized economy,environmental problems have become the focus of attention of the whole society.Xi Jinping has made a strategic deployment for the steady promotion of green development.In the past decade,China has intensively released a series of important documents and policies on environmental protection and green development.The green credit policy is one of the important policies proposed around green development.Green credit policy requires banks to strictly examine the process of credit allocation,restrict credit allocation to enterprises with rough pollutant emissions,and punish them with higher interest rates,while increasing credit support to environment-friendly enterprises and green industries,adopting financial means such as low interest rate preferences to promote their green development.The green credit policy aims to urge polluting enterprises to actively assume environmental social responsibility.According to Porter’s hypothesis,a reasonable and severe environmental constraint has an "innovation compensation effect",which can improve the level of green technological innovation and get a win-win effect for both the economy and the environment.The green credit policies help promote the development and innovation of environmental protection industries and enterprises,which has been confirmed by empirical studies.However,there is no clear conclusion on whether green credit policy can promote the green transformation of heavy polluting industries.Therefore,studying whether Porter’s hypothesis can be applied to heavily polluting companies and whether green credit policy can effectively promote the green development of heavily polluting industries has a critical role in the evaluation and subsequent optimization of the effectiveness of green credit policy.This paper selects listed enterprises in non-financial industries in Shanghai and Shenzhen A-shares from 2008-2021 as the research sample,measures the level of green technological innovation of enterprises by the number of green patent applications,uses the promulgation of the Green Credit Guidelines in 2012 as a quasi-natural experiment,establishes a double difference model to investigate in depth whether green credit policies affect the level of green technological innovation of heavy polluting enterprises,and then applies parallel trend test,placebo test,propensity score matching,and tobit regression to test the robustness of the empirical results.Then,further studies are conducted to examine the effects of green credit policies on green technology innovation of heavy polluting enterprises based on the mediating effects of credit size and credit cost;finally,group regressions are conducted for enterprises with different ownership nature,different enterprise sizes,different economic development levels and different types of green patents to examine the differences in the effects of green credit policies on them.The research findings:(1)On the whole,after the implementation of the Green Credit Guidelines,compared with non heavily polluting industries,the green credit policy has hindered the green transformation of heavily polluting industries.(2)From the perspective of action mechanism,credit scale and credit cost are important intermediary variables for the Green Credit Guidelines to curb the green innovation of heavily polluting enterprises.The mechanism is that due to the problem of information asymmetry,the green credit policy aimed at reducing environmental risk adopts a "one size fits all" approach to heavily polluting enterprises,reducing the credit scale of heavily polluting enterprises and increasing their loan costs,While curbing the scale expansion of heavily polluting enterprises,it also hinders their green innovation activities.(3)Heterogeneity test shows that the implementation of the Green Credit Guidelines inhibits the green innovation of heavily polluting enterprises,which is more obvious in non-state-owned enterprises,small enterprises,and enterprises in areas with low financial development level.At the same time,compared with green new utility patents,green credit policies significantly inhibit the innovation of green invention patents of heavily polluting enterprises.These findings provide a theoretical basis for subsequent policy promotion.Finally,according to the conclusion,this paper gives some suggestions about both the government and the bank.The main innovations of this paper are:(1)Most of the existing studies analyze the impact of policy implementation on the green innovation of heavy polluting enterprises through the intermediary transmission path of green credit policy affecting their credit scale,while fewer studies use credit cost as a mediating variable.This paper explores the mediating role played by green credit policies in promoting the green transformation of enterprises in terms of both credit scale and credit cost,thus further improving the research on the mechanism of the role of green credit policies in influencing the green innovation of heavily polluting enterprises.(2)While most of the current studies,when exploring the impact of green credit policies on the green innovation of heavily polluting enterprises under different levels of financial development,classify their research based on simple geographical differences(e.g.East,Central and West),this paper innovatively classifies enterprises by measuring the financial marketization index of each region,so as to more accurately and scientifically determine the impact of the level of financial development in the implementation of green credit policies This paper further enriches the research on the impact of green credit policies on the green innovation of heavily polluting enterprises by measuring the differences in the financial marketization index of each region.