绿色信贷政策驱动重污染企业绿色创新了吗——基于企业生命周期理论的实证检验

Does Green Credit Policy Drive Green Innovation Of Heavily Polluting Enterprises?An Empirical Test Based on Firm Life Cycle Theory

在不同企业生命周期下,实施精准化的绿色信贷政策对提高企业绿色创新水平具有重要影响。本文以《绿色信贷指引》为准自然实验,选取2007—2017年中国重污染上市企业为样本数据,从企业生命周期视角出发,运用双重差分模型探究绿色信贷对重污染企业绿色创新的作用效果及路径。研究发现,绿色信贷政策对重污染企业绿色创新具有抑制效应,且对处于不同生命周期阶段的重污染企业的作用路径存在差异性。绿色信贷政策通过增加融资约束和减少研发投入而抑制处于成长期和衰退期的重污染企业的绿色创新;通过影响融资约束和资本投资抑制处于成熟期的重污染企业的绿色创新。此外,企业产权结构、企业环保社会责任对绿色信贷政策的抑制效果具有负向调节作用,而银企污染信息对称程度则能够正向调节绿色信贷政策的抑制效应。本研究为政策制定者提供了从企业生命周期视角优化绿色信贷政策的科学依据,以期更有效地推动可持续发展目标的实现。

Under the“dual carbon”strategic framework,green credit serves as a critical financial tool for promoting corporate green innovation and transformation,playing a significant role in fostering the green and low-carbon development of China’s economy.Green credit aims to provide financial support to enterprises,encouraging green innovative behaviors and transformational upgrades.However,green credit policies typically favor enterprises that already demonstrate good environmental performance or are low-polluting.For heavily polluting enterprises,financial institutions often regard them as high environmental risks,thus the effectiveness of green credit on the green innovation of heavily polluting enterprises requires further examination.Additionally,existing studies seldom focus on the effects of green credit policies on heavily polluting enterprises at different stages of their lifecycle or the heterogeneity in their pathways of influence.This paper uses the“Green Credit Guidelines”as a quasi-natural experiment and selects Chinese heavily polluting listed companies from 2007 to 2017 as sample data.From the perspective of the firm lifecycle,it employs a difference-in-differences model to explore the effects and pathways of green credit on the green innovation of heavily polluting enterprises.The research finds that at different stages of the firm lifecycle, green credit policies have a crowding-out effect on corporate green innovation, and the pathways of this effect vary. Specifically, green credit policies exacerbate financing constraints and reduce R&D investment, suppressing green innovation in heavily polluting enterprises during their growth and decline phases;and affect capital investment and financing con-straints, suppressing green innovation in mature heavily polluting enterprises. Moreover, the corporate ownership structure and cor-porate environmental social responsibility negatively modulate the inhibitory effects of green credit policies, while the symmetry of pollution information between banks and enterprises can positively modulate these effects. Compared to previous literature, this paper makes extensions in three aspects: first, it explores the impact of green credit policies on green innovation in heavily polluting enterprises from the perspective of different firm lifecycle stages, providing theoretical and empirical evidence for the precise implementation of green credit policies. Second, it clarifies the internal “black box” mechanisms between green credit policies and green innovation of heavily polluting enterprises, exploring the differential mechanisms of action on green innovation across various lifecycle stages. Lastly, the paper identifies effective leverage points for green credit policy imple-mentation, starting from the modulation roles of ownership structure, social responsibility, and the symmetry of pollution information between banks and enterprises. This study reveals the effects of green credit policies on green innovation in heavily polluting enterprises, identifies the mechanisms of action at different lifecycle stages, and aids the government in proposing precise green financial policies to support green innova-tive behaviors in heavily polluting enterprises, facilitating their green transformation and upgrade.