Can Banks'ESG Preferences Curb Corporate Greenwashing?——Empirical Evidence from Bank-enterprise Credit Matching
The Third Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China pointed out the need to improve the mechanism for green and low-carbon development.In view of this,this article takes listed companies and commercial banks in China from 2013 to 2023 as the research objects,manually sorting out about 160,000 loan records of banks and enterprises to achieve bank enterprise credit correlation.Based on media reports and corporate annual reports,machine learning algorithms were used to construct the ESG index of commercial banks and the corporate greenwashing index.Empirical tests found that:(1)ESG preferences of commercial banks can significantly inhibit corporate greenwashing.This conclusion still holds true after being tested by instrumental variable method,PSM processing,Heckman,and dual machine learning;(2)Mechanism analysis shows that ESG preferences suppress corporate greenwashing through credit allocation effects and information governance effects,that is,alleviating corporate financing constraints and improving corporate information transparency are important mechanisms for banks'ESG preferences to suppress corporate greenwashing;(3)There is a clear synergy between bank and enterprise ESG,which can strengthen the inhibitory effect of bank ESG on corporate greenwashing through"credit allocation synergy"and"information governance synergy";(4)Heterogeneity analysis shows that bank ESG preferences have inclusive and complementary effects.The inhibitory effect of bank ESG on corporate greenwashing is more pronounced in small and medium-sized enterprises and enterprises with low market attention,and the synergistic phenomenon of bank enterprise ESG is relatively stronger.
Bank ESG PreferenceEnterprise GreenwashingBank Enterprise ESG Collaboration
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
