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How does green credit policy affect total factor productivity at the corporate level in China: the mediating role of debt financing and the moderating role of financial mismatch

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Abstract

Taking the “Green Credit Guidelines” issued in 2012 as a quasi-natural experiment and employing the A-share listed enterprises scanning from 2008 to 2020 as the research sample, this study has investigated the impact of green credit policy on total factor productivity at the corporate level in China, with the consideration of the mediating role of debt financing and the moderating role of financial mismatch. The findings are as follows: (1) green credit policy has effectively and directly promoted total factor productivity at the corporate level in China, (2) the mediating role of debt financing is merely supported for the full sample and the state-owned sample, (3) the moderating role of financial mismatch is merely established via codirectionally moderating the negative impact of green credit policy on debt financing for the full sample and the eastern sample, and (4) the non-state-owned enterprises’ dilemma of difficult and expensive debt financing is proved. The conclusions and policy implementations are provided in the last section to highlight the practical and theoretical contributions of this study.

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Data availability

The data used to support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon request.

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Funding

Sponsored by Program for Science and Technology Innovation Talents in Universities of Henan Province (Grant No. 2021-CX-018) and Great Education Science Bidding Project of 14th Five Year Plan in 2022 of Henan Province (Grant No. 2021JKZB05).

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Contributions

Yanchao Feng: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing — Original draft; Qiong Shen: Writing — Reviewing and Editing.

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Correspondence to Qiong Shen.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Feng, Y., Shen, Q. How does green credit policy affect total factor productivity at the corporate level in China: the mediating role of debt financing and the moderating role of financial mismatch. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 23237–23248 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-17521-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-17521-3

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