Abstract
In recent years, disasters caused by climate change have brought marked losses to individual economic agents. To cope with fluctuating climate risks, climate policies have witnessed frequent adjustments worldwide, resulting in heightening uncertainty on climate policies that have become an important factor affecting business operations. This paper uses a fixed-effects model to study the role of climate policy uncertainty on the financialization of China’s A-share listed enterprises. Our results find that a rise in climate policy uncertainty has a dampening effect on corporate financialization, while energy-intensive enterprises are most affected. Although climate policy uncertainty negatively impacts the size of enterprises' financial assets, the impact varies for different types of financial assets. We recommend that the government should maintain a robust climate policy to prevent frequent policy changes from harming company operations. This paper fills the gap by investigating the relationship between climate policy and corporate financialization. Under the backdrop of a rising climate policy uncertainty, our findings possess important implications for the improvement in enterprises' business strategies and policy effectiveness against global climate change.
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The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Notes
Class A shares are RMB ordinary shares, denominated in RMB, and are restricted to subscription and trading by Chinese citizens in RMB as permitted by the policy.
ST and PT are companies that have been temporarily suspended or are about to be delisted and have less credible financial data. Financial sector financial indicators are different from other sectors and therefore need to be excluded.
The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Ren, X., Li, W., Duan, K. et al. Does climate policy uncertainty really affect corporate financialization?. Environ Dev Sustain 26, 4705–4723 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-023-02905-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-023-02905-x