Carbon risk and debt financing: An international perspective

IF 2.8 2区经济学 Q2 BUSINESS, FINANCE

Journal of International Money and Finance Pub Date : 2025-02-12 DOI:10.1016/j.jimonfin.2025.103294

Xiaohang Ren , Wenqi Li , Kun Duan , Andrew Urquhart

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Abstract

Threatening escalation of carbon emissions has elicited increasing attention to the significance of carbon risk in shaping a firm’s debt financing decision. Despite the policy significance, the relationship between carbon risk and debt financing remains to be resolved. This paper provides a firm-level investigation to seek insights into the impact of carbon risk on debt financing. Employing an international dataset covering 24 economies, our results suggest that rising carbon risk leads to debt expansion, validating the liquidity shortage view that carbon risk enlarges firm’s liquidity concerns to resort to debt financing. The debt expansion effect of carbon risk is found to be more pronounced in countries with high uncertainty and low socio-economic development, industries with high competition, firms with non-high-tech attributes, low financial constraints, limited growth opportunities, and leverage ratios below the optimal level. Further analysis supports the Porter hypothesis by showing that carbon risk and its resultant debt expansion can enhance corporate performance in a time-lagged pattern.

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碳风险与债务融资：一个国际视角

碳排放升级的威胁引起了人们对碳风险在影响企业债务融资决策中的重要性的越来越多的关注。尽管具有政策意义，但碳风险与债务融资之间的关系仍有待解决。本文从企业层面考察碳风险对债务融资的影响。采用覆盖24个经济体的国际数据集，我们的研究结果表明，碳风险上升导致债务扩张，验证了流动性短缺观点，即碳风险加剧了企业对流动性的担忧，从而诉诸债务融资。碳风险的债务扩张效应在高不确定性、低社会经济发展水平、高竞争行业、非高科技属性企业、低金融约束、有限增长机会和杠杆率低于最优水平的国家更为明显。进一步的分析支持了波特假设，表明碳风险及其导致的债务扩张可以在时间滞后模式下提高企业绩效。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Journal of International Money and Finance BUSINESS, FINANCE-

CiteScore

4.20

自引率

4.00%

发文量

141

期刊介绍： Since its launch in 1982, Journal of International Money and Finance has built up a solid reputation as a high quality scholarly journal devoted to theoretical and empirical research in the fields of international monetary economics, international finance, and the rapidly developing overlap area between the two. Researchers in these areas, and financial market professionals too, pay attention to the articles that the journal publishes. Authors published in the journal are in the forefront of scholarly research on exchange rate behaviour, foreign exchange options, international capital markets, international monetary and fiscal policy, international transmission and related questions.