Will Green Development Increase the Cost of Debt Financing for Heavily Polluting Companies?

Abstract

In order to explore whether the growth of green development level increases the debt financing cost of heavily polluting companies, this paper takes the green development level index, corporate social responsibility performance (CSR) and corporate debt financing cost as the main research variables, and builds a fixed-effect regression model to get the results: For non-state-owned companies, there is a significant negative correlation between the level of green development and the cost of debt financing which means that the higher green development level of the government in the region where the heavily polluting industry is located, the lower the debt financing cost of the enterprise; CSR is negatively correlated with the cost of debt financing, indicating that improving CSR will help reduce the cost of corporate debt financing. At the same time, the intersection of green development level and CSR has a significant negative correlation with the debt financing cost of heavily polluting companies, but the correlation coefficient is not high, indicating that CSR plays a significant partial intermediary role in the relationship between green development levels and debt financing costs. Finally, this paper puts forward countermeasures and suggestions from the aspects of government environmental regulation and supervision and enterprise internal management.