Summary:
Promoting green and low-carbon development of the economy and society is essential for achieving high-quality development. Green finance plays a significant role in promoting the green transition of the economy and society. In recent years, China's banking system has made remarkable progress in green credit, with the balance reaching 44.7 trillion yuan by the end of 2025, ranking first globally in terms of scale. However, due to the incomplete green standards and information disclosure systems, green credit has encountered the issue of greenwashing, where borrowers misappropriate green loan funds. Such post-loan greenwashing distorts the allocation of green financial resources and undermines the effectiveness of green finance in supporting low-carbon development. In response, regulatory authorities have prioritized the quality and effectiveness of green loans, thereby incentivizing banks to fulfill their environmental responsibilities to ensure that these loans yield the expected environmental benefits. Meanwhile, some banks, such as the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and Bank of Jiangsu, have enhanced post-loan management through regular inspections and environmental risk reporting. This indicates that banks are actively fulfilling environmental responsibilities and strengthening supervision to mitigate greenwashing risks. Furthermore, the green reputation banks have built through fulfilling environmental responsibilities may also deter borrowers from greenwashing. An important question remains: can banks’ fulfillment of environmental responsibilities effectively constrain borrowers’ post-loan greenwashing behavior? Does this constraint stem from strengthened post-loan management or the accumulation of green reputation? Investigating these questions helps clarify the quality and effectivenes of green finance in serving the green transformation of the real economy. To address this, based on a sample of 2012 green loans issued by 27 Chinese listed banks from 2013 to 2022, this paper investigates the impact and underlying mechanisms of banks’ environmental responsibility fulfillment on enterprises’ post-loan greenwashing behavior. Furthermore, it explores how green standards and post-loan management incentives and constraints moderate this relationship. The results show that banks’ fulfillment of environmental responsibilities significantly curbs borrowers’ post-loan greenwashing behavior, primarily through strengthened post-loan management measures (e.g., enhanced on-site inspections, exit threats, and reductions in credit lines and terms), rather than through green reputation accumulation. Moreover, clearer green standards and stronger post-loan management incentives and constraints reinforce this effect. This paper offers the following policy insights: First, while prioritizing green finance and fulfilling environmental responsibilities, banks should not only expand the scale and share of green credit but also pay attention to the quality and effectiveness of green credit assets. Second, strengthening post-loan management is a fundamental measure to curb greenwashing behavior and enhance the quality and effectiveness of green finance. Third, it is essential to further improve green standards and strengthen the incentive and constraint effects of green finance policies. The contributions of this paper are as follows: First, it contributes to the research on the economic effects of banks’ environmental responsibility fulfillment. While previous studies have primarily focused on the impact of green loan issuance on banks’ operational performance and risk-taking, as well as on the environmental performance and technological innovation of borrowers, this study investigates the impact of banks’ environmental responsibility fulfillment on borrowers’ greenwashing behavior and its mechanisms, which helps reveal the quality and effectiveness of banks’ green finance practices. Second, it advances the research on corporate greenwashing by shifting the focus from strategic green information disclosure and pre-loan project packaging to post-loan misappropriation of credit funds. Finally, it enriches the research on the evaluation of green finance policy effects, from the perspective of moderating effects. This paper examines how green finance-related regulatory policies moderate the inhibitory effect of banks’ environmental responsibility fulfillment on greenwashing in green loans, and provides micro-level empirical evidence from bank credit management for regulatory authorities to further improve the external environment for banks’ green credit governance.
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