International Business School, Guangzhou College of South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510080, China.
College of Economics and Management, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, China.
Environ Sci Pollut Res Int. 2021 Nov;28(41):58007-58017. doi: 10.1007/s11356-021-14736-2. Epub 2021 Jun 8.
China has emerged as the world's largest pollutant emitter due to rapid industrialization and a remarkable economic upsurge in recent decades. Rising carbon emissions have exerted more social and regulatory pressure on Chinese corporations to undertake environmental protection investments. However, the implications of such investments on the financial fundamentals of a firm remain unclear. Especially, little is known about how environmental protection investments affect the performance of financially constrained firms. This study explores the mediating role of financial constraints in the nexus between corporate environmental protection investment and the accounting and market performance of Chinese listed firms during 2009-2016. The empirical outcomes of the generalized method of moments (GMM)-based regressions reveal that environmental investments of non-constrained firms have a positive impact on the accounting and market performance of such firms as measured by ROA and Tobin's q, respectively. Interestingly, environmental protection investments have a significant negative association with both (i.e., the accounting and market) performance proxies of firms that are facing financial constraints. These findings imply that in pursuit of environment preservation and pollution abatement, regulators shall provide more financial flexibility and enabling environment to financially constrained firms to optimize their role in pollution abatement. Besides, financially non-constrained firms shall be assigned greater environmental responsibility to undertake a proportionately higher environmental investment than financially constrained firms.
由于近几十年来工业化的迅速发展和经济的显著增长，中国已成为世界上最大的污染物排放国。碳排放的增加给中国企业带来了更多的社会和监管压力，要求它们进行环境保护投资。然而，这些投资对企业财务基本面的影响尚不清楚。特别是，人们对环境保护投资如何影响财务受限企业的业绩知之甚少。本研究探讨了财务约束在企业环境保护投资与中国上市公司 2009-2016 年会计和市场绩效之间关系中的中介作用。广义矩估计（GMM）回归的实证结果表明，非受限企业的环境投资对 ROA 和托宾 q 分别衡量的企业会计和市场绩效有正向影响。有趣的是，环境保护投资与面临财务约束的企业的（即会计和市场）绩效指标呈显著负相关。这些发现意味着，为了追求环境保护和污染减排，监管机构应向财务受限企业提供更多的财务灵活性和有利环境，以优化其在污染减排方面的作用。此外，财务不受限的企业应承担更大的环境责任，比财务受限的企业承担更高比例的环境投资。
