High environmental performance of enterprises may reduce financing costs, while good environmental performance can promote sustainable development of enterprises. Therefore, this paper examines the impact mechanism of China’s corporate environmental performance on financing costs, and whether corporate sustainable development plays a regulatory role in the research of heavy pollution industries. This study is conducted through the Breusch and Pagan Lagrange multiplier test for random effects and the Hausman test to determine whether to adopt Fixed-effects regression or Random-effects GLS regression as an estimation method to control individual effects and endogenous problems brought by time. By collecting the samples of listed companies in China from 2010 to 2021, the empirical results show that corporate environmental performance is negatively related to financing costs. Sustainable development, as a moderator variable, is negatively related to financing costs and has weakened the inhibition of corporate environmental performance on financing costs. Although the existing literature shows that environmental performance will lead to changes in debt costs, this study has made contributions to the literature by revealing the sustainable development mechanism in the relationship between corporate environmental performance and financing costs and has verified that sustainable development is one of the important factors affecting financing costs.
Voluntary corporate carbon information disclosure not only meets the carbon information needs of investors, but also enhances the legitimacy of organizations. Building a green image may increase the public consumption of products and be conducive to reducing the cost of debt. As a part of creditors’ assessment of debtors’ solvency, operational efficiency is the basic factor of debt cost reduction. By constructing the correlation between carbon information disclosure and operational efficiency, this paper attempts to test the mediating effect of carbon information disclosure in the relationship between operational efficiency and debt cost, so as to increase the understanding of the mechanism of action between carbon information disclosure and debt cost. Stepwise regression method and Bootstrap statistical method were used to test. The results show that the higher the operational efficiency, the lower the debt cost; the carbon information disclosure of enterprises in low-carbon industries has a significant partial mediating effect on the relationship between operational efficiency and debt cost while that of carbon-intensive industries is not significant. It verifies that the operating efficiency of low-carbon industry can affect the cost of debt through carbon information disclosure, and finds a significant correlation between carbon information disclosure and operating efficiency. This study broadens ways for enterprises in low-carbon industries to reduce debt costs, highlights the role of operational efficiency in various industries, and reveals favorable evidence in the positive value of carbon disclosure in low-carbon industries which in essence can better reflect the enthusiasm of enterprises in their own financing or the restrictive channels of enterprise carbon performance evaluation. This has implications for the research on how to promote the link between carbon information disclosure and debt cost of enterprises in high-carbon industries, which will help enterprises in the future to make carbon information transparency or voluntarily disclose carbon information. It is of great significance for regional and industrial enterprises to choose the disclosure system of voluntary or mandatory carbon information disclosure.
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