Excerpt

Do financial constraints curb firms’ efforts to control pollution? Evidence from Chinese manufacturing firms. Richard Freeman, January 12, 2019, Paper, "Financial constraints have long existed in China’s manufacturing sectors. The growth of the manufacturing sector has been slowing in recent years due to increasingly strict environmental regulations that force factories to cut production. In this study, we discussed whether financial constraints were essential in firms’ decision to control pollution, and matched the Annual Surveys of Industrial Firms dataset with the Ministry of Environmental Protection survey data on firms’ expenditures in industrial waste gas emission control. The relationship between calculated investment-cash flow sensitivity (ICFS) and the environmental investment ratio (ratio of firms’ expenditures on pollution control to total assets) was analyzed. We found that, overall, financial constraints had a significantly negative effect on firms’ efforts to reduce waste gas emission." Link