The Impact of Green Credit Policies on Corporate Environmental Responsibility Fulfillment: From an Ex Ante and Ex Post Perspective

Abstract

Green credit policy is a new way to improve the allocation of credit resources and make enterprises abide by the great system of environmental responsibility. In this paper, the overall idea of combining pre-prevention with post-treatment is used. Taking A-share listed companies from 2007 to 2020 as samples, the two-way fixed-effects model is used to explore the realization of corporate environmental responsibility by green creation policy. The survey results show that Green credit policy will greatly promote the achievement of corporate environmental responsibility. The mechanism is as follows: by limiting the environmental access standards in the audit stage before financing, enterprises are encouraged to take preventive measures, such as developing clean technology or improving projects. By monitoring the use of money post-loan, which drives ex-post actions such as end-of-pipe treatment and pollutant disposal, thereby realizing a systematic improvement in corporate environmental governance from source to end-of-pipe. These results exhibit conditional heterogeneity: Because state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have strict inspection on the government and need to abide by the rules, they can deal with it immediately in both the pre-and post-event stages. However, enterprises that are not state-owned enterprises have a little coping ability in the post-management stage. Through the analysis of the mechanism, it is found that green credit policies play a very important role in improving the ability of banks to find risks and pass on policies. Because of this policy, banks can well discover and stop the “greenwashing” behavior of enterprises, extract credit resources from high-risk enterprises with greenwashing, and correctly pass them on to truly conscientious enterprises, and the environmental benefits of enterprises are very good.