The Impact Of Corporate ESG Performance On Its Financing Constraints

In recent years,a series of problems such as environmental pollution,ecological destruction and sharp decline in biodiversity have triggered the thinking of all walks of life on green development.As the construction of ecological civilization is included in the general layout of the "Five in One" of the cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics,promoting green industrialization is an inevitable choice for achieving sustainable,healthy and efficient economic growth.The enterprise constitutes the basic unit of the economic system and is the key subject to realize the goal of sustainable development.Since the concept of ESG responsible investment was formally proposed by the United Nations Environment Program in 2006,many countries have responded and issued ESG responsible investment policies.China Securities Regulatory Commission and Asset Management Association of China also successively issued the "Governance Guidelines for Listed Companies" and the "Research Report on the ESG Rating System of Chinese Listed Companies" in 2018 to further improve the ESG information disclosure system and guide investors to put companies in environmental protection and social responsibility.and corporate governance performance into investment decisions.At the same time,corporate environmental scandals and operational problems continue to erupt,bringing losses to corporate stakeholders in many ways.As a result,corporate ESG performance has attracted more and more attention from the capital market.So the better the company’s ESG performance,can it ease the financing constraints? And by what means? This is the main question to be studied in this paper.This paper takes the A-share listed companies in China’s Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets from 2009 to 2021 as the research object,and empirically tests the impact of corporate ESG performance on financing constraints.This paper finds that the better a company’s ESG performance is,the less financing constraints it faces.Furthermore,in the heterogeneity analysis,this study found that there are differences in the impact of corporate ESG performance on financing constraints among companies with different property rights,information disclosure willingness and different listing regions.By contrast,among non-state-owned enterprises,eastern and central listed companies and voluntary information disclosure,the better the corporate ESG performance,the more significant the negative impact on financing constraints.In addition,this paper also finds that after the implementation of the new "Environmental Protection Law",the better the corporate ESG performance,the stronger the effect of alleviating financing constraints.Next,in the mechanism analysis of this paper,we find that we can explain why corporate ESG performance affects financing constraints from three perspectives: information asymmetry,internal control,and media supervision.Specifically,the better the company’s ESG performance,the more it can alleviate the degree of information asymmetry,and send a positive signal to the market by further improving the quality of internal control,and then realize the mitigation effect of financing constraints.In addition,media supervision has a negative moderating effect on the relationship between corporate ESG performance and financing constraints.Then in the robustness analysis,this paper firstly replaces the measurement indicators of financing constraints and changes the measurement method of explanatory variables to study the impact of corporate ESG performance on financing constraints,and discusses whether the impact of corporate ESG performance on financing constraints is sustainable.In order to alleviate the endogeneity problem,this paper respectively adopts the financing constraints of T+2 and T+3 period as the explained variable,the instrumental variable method,and the PSM test model to partially solve the endogeneity problem.The above tests show that the results of this paper are still robust.Finally,this paper summarizes the main conclusions and puts forward enlightenment and suggestions from the perspectives of investors,enterprises,government departments and media.