Environmental Credit-Based Governance and Green Finance: A Study of the Promulgation of the Law of Environmental Credit Evaluation

Green finance is an important aspect of the modern Chinese financial system with high-quality development, but best practices in promoting its rapid development have yet to be robustly explored. This study first analyzes the difficulty in the current development of green finance in China and its causes, and then analyzes the impact mechanism of new governance measures based on the results of an enterprise environmental credit evaluation conducted on green finance. Using the panel data of 280 cities from 2010 to 2021, we take 43 credit construction demonstration cities that have been approved by the state as quasinatural experiments for the construction of a multiple-timepoint double-difference model. The study finds that the environmental credit governance, as represented by a credit construction demonstration city, significantly promotes the local green finance level, and the mechanism test confirms that this positive effect was achieved by accelerating the data factorization. In addition, we find that the effect of environmental credit governance is more obvious in cities with higher administrative levels and more advantageous geographical locations. We provide further micro theoretical support for China's goal of achieving the two major political tasks of ecological environmental protection and social credit construction, and provide new inspiration for optimizing environmental governance strategies.