Does Green Credit Policy Work in China? The Correlation between Green Credit and Corporate Environmental Information Disclosure Quality

Roughly a decade ago, the Chinese government implemented a green credit policy aimed at lowering emissions from highly polluting corporations through improving information disclosure quality during the loan process. According to policy guidelines, banks may provide financial support only for new projects that passed an environmental assessment or were explicitly designed to decrease pollution. This paper used panel data from 320 companies in heavy polluting industries listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange from 2008 to 2016 and adopted a fixed effects regression model to examine whether collusion between local governments and Chinese listed companies has prevented the green credit policy from achieving its target. The results show that there is no significant positive correlation between CEID and corporate green financing, which means that the environmental information disclosure system does not send valuable signals to the market and has failed to become a decision-making tool for bank-risk management.