Author(s)

Yuxuan Shi

Corresponding Author

Yuxuan Shi

ABSTRACT

With the development of the economy and the change of the main theme of the times, China has changed from pursuing rapid economic development to high-quality development, in which environmental issues are particularly critical. Since the 19th National Congress of the Party, the Party Central Committee and the government have repeatedly stressed the need to strengthen the construction of ecological civilization. As the main source of environmental pollution, heavily polluting enterprises should shoulder the heavy responsibility of environmental governance. For them, how to find a balance between business development and environmental protection is very important. There are also many scholars in China who have studied the relationship between environmental performance and financial performance. The conclusions are mainly divided into positive correlation, negative correlation, U-shaped relationship and irrelevance. In addition, some scholars introduced variables that may affect the relationship in order to study the relationship between the two, such as the nature of property rights and company size. However, almost all of these studies have studied the relationship between the two from the micro level of individual enterprises, and their interpretation is relatively one-sided and single. As a participant in social production, the behavior of enterprises will inevitably be affected by competition in the external market, including the performance of environmental responsibilities. Based on this, the paper selects relevant data from 2014 to 2017 of listed companies in the heavily polluting industry on the main board of Shanghai and Shenzhen, and explores the impact of environmental performance on corporate financial performance from the perspective of industrial concentration, and analyzes the differences between companies with different property rights in this regard. The research results show that environmental performance is significantly positively related to corporate financial performance; industrial concentration has a significant moderating effect between environmental performance and financial performance, that is, the higher the degree of industrial concentration, the weaker the degree of market competition, and the smaller the positive impact of environmental performance on corporate financial performance. At the same time, according to the nature of property rights, the adjustment effect of industrial concentration is more prominent in non-state-owned enterprises. The research conclusions of this article will provide theoretical basis and support for the government to formulate relevant environmental protection policies for different heavily polluting industries, and have important theoretical significance and practical value.

KEYWORDS

Environmental performance, Financial performance, Heavily polluting industry, Industrial concentration, Property nature