Summary:
Currently, China is committed to pursuing all-round green economic transformation and high-quality development. In addition to relying on a variety of terminal environmental governance measures, it is necessary to establish an effective green finance support system to substantially improve the ecological environment, achieve green development, and stabilize economic growth. The green credit policy is now the dominating green finance policy in China. This policy focuses on restricting bank credit by means of intervention, emphasizing the unbalanced allocation of financial resources among different sectors. This may not be conducive to the overall green transformation of the economic system and the smooth transition of the economic growth rate in the short term. In the existing green finance system, the capital market is an important place to realize financing and information disclosure, and it can play an important role in regulating and improving efficiency and quality through the price mechanism. Therefore, it is particularly necessary to test the efficiency of green finance from the perspective of the capital market. This paper chooses green bonds, a market-based green financial instrument, as the research object, to investigate whether green finance supporting green transformation can positively interact with the capital market at the enterprise level. Studies have investigated the effects of green finance policies from macro and micro perspectives and showed the important function of green finance. However, few studies have explored the effectiveness of green finance from the perspective of the market. With regard to green bonds, scholars have focused on the issuance stage of green bonds and their impact on financial and environmental performance after issuance, but they have not fully realized and explored the positive interaction between green bonds and the capital market. For the first time, this paper discusses the relationship between green bond issuance and stock market performance from a relatively long-term perspective. Green bonds not only have the basic attributes of environmental regulation and resource allocation but also enhance the requirements of information disclosure. By issuing green bonds, enterprises can not only collect green resources and promote green governance but also optimize the enterprise information environment and reduce the degree of information asymmetry. Therefore, green bond issuance may not only affect market returns through performance but also change the possibility of stock price collapse from the information level. This paper studies whether enterprises issuing green bonds can obtain market incentives through the two dimensions of stock returns and crash risk. Taking non-financial A-share listed companies from 2012 to 2020 as the research sample, and green bond issuers and ordinary bond issuers as the treatment group and the control group, respectively, a staggered difference-in-difference model is constructed to study the market incentive results companies achieve when they issue green bonds for green governance transformation and the mechanism. The results show that green bonds can significantly increase the excess return and reduce the risk of stock price crashes. There is an obvious asymmetry in the level of market incentives achieved by heavily polluting industries and non-heavily polluting industries. The market incentives are also affected by the credit risk and governance level of enterprises. The mechanism studies show that the improvement of green governance performance and the easing of financing constraints are the internal and external motivations through which green bonds promote enterprises' market incentives. Meanwhile, the attention and governance of professional market subjects triggered by information channels also plays an important role. This paper's contributions are as follows: First, exploring the efficiency of green finance from the perspective of the capital market broadens the theoretical research boundaries of green finance. This study indicates that the capital market plays an important role in the way that green finance promotes economic transformation and high-quality development. Second, based on the two dimensions of return and risk and four measurement indicators, this paper fully proves that there are market incentives for green bond issuance. In particular, heavily polluting enterprises that issue green bonds can obtain more significant market incentives, which is in sharp contrast to the effect of green credit policies. At the same time, this paper also enriches the related literature of market green incentives from the perspective of finance. Third, based on the internal and external perspectives, this paper reveals that the potential mechanism through which green bond issuance affects the stock market are the three channels of green governance, financing constraints, and the information effect. This finding is a useful supplement to the existing green finance theory and has policy implications for improving the green finance system and capital market construction.
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