Abstract
This study interprets enterprise pollution reduction from the perspective of the financial market. Using data on Chinese industrial enterprises, this paper tests the impacts of bank competition on enterprise pollution emissions. The findings show that bank competition has a significant total effect and technique effect on pollutant reduction. Bank competition reduces pollutant emissions by easing financing constraints, increasing the implementation of internal pollution control, and improving the efficiency of bank credit resource allocation. Further research shows that both bank type and bank branch level could moderate the pollution reduction effects and such effects vary a lot under different environmental regulation intensities. We expand the relevant literature on the economic consequences of banking competition and have certain theoretical and practical reference significance for the future reform of the banking industry.
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Data availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the Ministry of Environmental Protection, China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, the Annual Survey of Industrial Firms, and China City Statistical Yearbook.
Notes
Figure 2 shows the distribution of bank branches in China at 2020 and the construction of bank competition.
Firm size is equal to the natural log of total firm assets, and firm age is equal to the current year minus the year the firm was founded.
The number of pollution treatment facilities equals the number of wastewater treatment facilities plus the number of waste gas treatment facilities.
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Funding
This study was supported by the key project of 2022 for Chongqing Education Science “14th Five-Year Plan” “Research on the relationship between scientific and technological R&D investment and innovation output in universities” (K22YD208086), 2023 Humanities and Social Science Research Project of Chongqing Education Commission “Research on Chongqing Digital Finance to promote the development of the specialized and sophisticated SMEs” (23SKGH174), the Chongqing Social Science Planning Project “Research on the evaluation and improvement path of Chongqing financial system to support scientific and technological innovation” (2022NDQN28), the Research of National Social Science Fund Projects “A study on relative poverty identification and long-term governance mechanism of Chongqing-Hubei-Hunan-Guizhou border region” (20CGL050), the Chongqing Technology and Business University High-level Talent Project (2155048), Special Research Project on Chongqing Technology and Business University “Learning and Implementing the Spirit of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China” “Research on the carbon reduction effect and optimization path of new infrastructure investment” (ctbuesd30), and Postdoctoral Science Foundation Project of Chongqing Natural Science Foundation “Research on the regional homogeneity effect of entity enterprise financialization: Generation mechanism, economic consequence and governance” (cstc2021jcyj-bshX0186).
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Yufeng Xia designed this study, participated in all phases, and analyzed the data; Xu Lou contributed analysis tools and wrote the complete paper; Wei Liu contributed analysis tools and revised the paper; Yanchun Xia reviewed and revised the paper. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Xia, Y., Lou, X., Liu, W. et al. Does bank competition curb corporate pollution emissions? Evidence from the geographical location of bank branches. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30, 67087–67108 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-27055-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-27055-5