Does green governance affect financing constraints? Evidence from China's heavily polluting enterprises

Given the increasing focus on global sustainable development, many enter-prises in developing countries such as China participate in green governance and scale up their green investment; however, many enterprises still experience financing difficulties. Our study investigates whether green governance can mit-igate corporate financing constraints. Using a sample of Chinese, A-share listed, high-pollution enterprises from 2013 to 2018, we find that corporate green governance practices, including environmental performance and infor-mation disclosure, ease corporate financing constraints. This effect is pro-nounced in areas with high levels of financial development and for state-owned enterprises. This paper not only proposes a channel for alleviating enterprises' financing constraints but also reveals the importance of industrial transformation and emissions reduction for energy-intensive industries in emerging markets.(c) 2022 Sun Yat-sen University. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecom-mons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).