Heterogeneity in the effect of green financing constraints on labor investment efficiency: A causal forest approach

IF 4.2 2区经济学 Q1 ECONOMICS

Economic Modelling Pub Date : 2025-02-01 DOI:10.1016/j.econmod.2024.106977

Tingwen Liu , Jie Liu , Tzu-Chang Forrest Cheng

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Abstract

This study evaluates the heterogeneous effects of green credit policy on labor investment efficiency. We analyze Chinese listed firms from 2005 to 2020 using the difference-in-differences method and causal forest approach based on the introduction of the 2012 Green Credit Guidelines. Our results show that this policy improves labor investment efficiency in high-polluting firms by reducing over-investment. Causal forest analyses reveal nonlinear and heterogeneous treatment effects, indicating that firms with lower market capitalization, lower liquidity, and higher leverage experience efficiency declines due to financial constraints. Faced with severe agency problems, state-owned enterprises and firms with high employment variability and abnormal investment achieve significant efficiency gains. Finally, despite lower innovation among high-polluting firms following policy implementation, the increased labor investment efficiency mitigates this impact. Overall, the heterogeneity analysis using causal forests highlights the groups most significantly affected by the policy.

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来源期刊

Economic Modelling ECONOMICS-

CiteScore

8.00

自引率

10.60%

发文量

295

期刊介绍： Economic Modelling fills a major gap in the economics literature, providing a single source of both theoretical and applied papers on economic modelling. The journal prime objective is to provide an international review of the state-of-the-art in economic modelling. Economic Modelling publishes the complete versions of many large-scale models of industrially advanced economies which have been developed for policy analysis. Examples are the Bank of England Model and the US Federal Reserve Board Model which had hitherto been unpublished. As individual models are revised and updated, the journal publishes subsequent papers dealing with these revisions, so keeping its readers as up to date as possible.