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Do Lenders Applaud Corporate Environmental Performance? Evidence from Chinese Private-Owned Firms

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Abstract

This study extends previous literature on the association between corporate social responsibility and corporate financial behavior by investigating the influence of corporate environmental performance on the cost of debt. Using a sample of Chinese private-owned firms, we document strong and consistent evidence to show that corporate environmental performance is significantly negatively associated with the interest rate on debt—the proxy for the cost of debt. The findings suggest that lenders applaud better environmental performance. Moreover, internal control attenuates the negative association between corporate environmental performance and the interest rate on debt, implying substitutive effects between corporate environmental performance and internal control on the reduction of interest rates on debt. The results are robust to various sensitivity tests and are still valid after controlling for the potential endogeneity between corporate environmental performance and the interest rate on debt.

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Notes

  1. Goss and Roberts (2011) argue that the conditional response of bankers to borrowers’ quality brings out the positive association between CSR and the cost of debt. In fact, the higher interest rate in low-quality borrowers required by bankers compensates for higher-level default risks originated from agency conflicts between managers and lenders.

  2. We are especially grateful to the referee for his/her suggestion that we should qualify our statement on the negative association between internal control and administrative sanctions because Daines et al. (2010) find that commercially available governance rankings is little associated with governance-related performance. As the response, we collect data on administrative sanctions imposed by China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) from China Stock Market Accounting Research (CSMAR) database and investigate the influence of internal control on administrative sanctions. Non-tabulated results show that the commercially available internal control score is significantly negatively associated with the risk of administrative sanctions, providing support for our corresponding statement.

  3. We acknowledge our great thanks to the referee for his/her suggestion that we should compare the cost of debt based on accounting data and the cost of individual loans. Clearly, our test variable is corporate environmental performance, a comprehensive index based on environmental performance disclosure index and the content analysis framework rather than accounting data. Therefore, it is less likely that the measurement bias in corporate environmental performance is systematically correlated with the measurement bias in the interest rate on debt.

  4. We acknowledge our great thanks to the referee’s suggestion on debt maturity and secured status of debt.

  5. The Marketization index, compiled by the National Economic Research Institute (Fan et al. 2011), “captures the extent of market development across Chinese provinces. The Marketization index is made up of five components (relationship between government and markets, development of non-state sector in the economy, development of product markets, development of factor markets, and development of market intermediaries and legal environment) and a variety of subcomponents. The minimum and maximum values of each sub-component in the year of 1999 are assigned to be the base values, and are specified to be 0 and 10, respectively. The total Marketization index is the mean value of the scores of all subcomponents which are normalized by the corresponding base year values”.

  6. We acknowledge our great thanks to the referee for his/her valuable suggestion. According to the suggestion, we employ the variance inflation factors and condition indices to diagnose the multicollinearity, respectively. Non-tabulated results show that the largest condition index (or intercept-adjusted condition index) is far less than 10, suggesting that there is no serious multicollinearity in our empirical models (Belsley 1991; Belsley et al. 1980; Greene 1990).

  7. We acknowledge our great thanks to the referee for his/her constructive comments that the relatively higher percentage of shares held by the largest shareholder (FIRST) may be the reason for the insignificant coefficients on DUAL, INDR, and MAN_SHR.

  8. Sargan χ 2 statistics is 9.6278 with p = 0.2107, Basmann χ 2 statistics is 9.4136 with p = 0.2243, and Wooldridge χ 2 statistics is 7.6205 with p = 0.3672, respectively.

  9. We acknowledge our great thanks for the referee’s valuable suggestion on the matching tests.

  10. We acknowledge our great thanks for the referee’s valuable suggestion on the subsample tests.

  11. We acknowledge our great thanks for the referee’s valuable suggestion on the natural experiment about environmental risk. Because data on excellent environmental practices is unavailable, we can just hand-collect the data on environmental disasters in private-owned firms during the period of 2009–2011.

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Acknowledgments

We are especially grateful to Prof. Gary Monroe (the section editor) and one anonymous reviewer for their many insightful suggestions and constructive comments. We also appreciate valuable comments from Bin Lin, Wentao Feng, Wei Jian, Shaojuan Lai, Yongkui Zhang, and participants of our presentations at Xiamen University, and Shanghai University. Prof. Xingqiang Du acknowledges financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (approval number: 71072053), the Key Project of Key Research Institute of Humanities and Social Science in Ministry of Education (approval number: 13JJD790027), the Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China (approval number: 20120121110007), and Xiamen University’s Prosperity Plan Project of Philosophy and Social Sciences (the sub-project for Center for Accounting Studies and the sub-project for School of Management).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Accounting Department, School of Management, Xiamen University, Xiamen, 361005, Fujian, China

    Xingqiang Du

  2. Department of Business Administration, Xiamen Ocean Vocational College, Xiamen, 361012, Fujian, China

    Jianying Weng

  3. School of Management, Xiamen University, No. 422, Siming South Road, Xiamen, 361005, Fujian, China

    Quan Zeng

  4. Accounting Department, Xiamen University, Xiamen, 361005, Fujian, China

    Yingying Chang & Hongmei Pei

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  1. Xingqiang Du
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Correspondence to Quan Zeng.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 11.

Table 11 Variables definition
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Appendix 2

See Table 12.

Table 12 The procedures for computing corporate environmental performance (CEP), descriptive statistics of seven CEP-components and all CEP-subcomponents, and univariate tests
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Du, X., Weng, J., Zeng, Q. et al. Do Lenders Applaud Corporate Environmental Performance? Evidence from Chinese Private-Owned Firms. J Bus Ethics 143, 179–207 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-015-2758-2

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