Do Green Credit Policies Reshape Corporate Capital Structure? Evidence from China

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-801-6_95How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Green Credit; Corporate Leverage; Difference-in-Differences; Green Finance

Abstract

In 2012, the China Banking Regulatory Commission issued the “Green Credit Guidelines” aimed at guiding bank credit resources away from industries with higher environmental risks. Based on this background, this article explores whether the policy has significantly changed the debt financing choices of Chinese listed companies. The study is based on panel data at the enterprise level and designed using the double difference method to compare heavily polluting industry enterprises and non-heavily polluting industry enterprises before and after policy implementation. The policy coefficients in both models are negative, indicating that the policy may have suppressed debt financing for heavily polluting enterprises. But after controlling for profitability and company size, the absolute value of the coefficient decreases and is not statistically significant. The results indicate that the leverage ratio of affected enterprises may have decreased, but the small sample does not support clear causal inference. This article reveals the potential impact of environmental loan rules on corporate financing decisions and points out the data limitations that future research needs to overcome.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Andi Liu
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/10/23
TI  - Do Green Credit Policies Reshape Corporate Capital Structure? Evidence from China
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 2nd International Conference on Financial Innovation and Marketing Management (FIMM 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 906
EP  - 913
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-801-6_95
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-801-6_95
ID  - Liu2026
ER  -