Research On The Impact Of Institutional Investors On Enterprise Environmental Protection Investment From The Perspective Of Internal Control

Since the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China,the Chinese economy has entered a stage of high-quality development.Implementing the concept of green development and vigorously promoting environmental protection and governance is an essential link in achieving high-quality economic development in China.Enterprises are the main participants in the market and important micro entities in environmental governance,and should actively assume the responsibility of environmental protection.Investing in environmental protection by enterprises is an important measure to promote environmental governance.Institutional investors are the main participants in the financial market,actively responding to the country’s green development policies,such as the launch of the Southern ESG pure bond fund by Southern Fund;Guotai Junan Securities has established a carbon finance business team and completed the first Shanghai carbon quota forward transaction.Institutional investors helping enterprises achieve green and low-carbon transformation will have an impact on their environmental investment.In addition,effective internal control provides a good institutional foundation for corporate governance,reducing various risks brought by insufficient environmental investment in enterprises.Therefore,this article places institutional investors,internal control,and environmental investment under the same framework for research.Based on sustainable development theory,corporate social responsibility theory,stakeholder theory and internal control theory,from the perspective of internal control,this paper empirically tests the impact of institutional investors on corporate environmental protection investment and the intermediary role of internal control between the two,taking the financial data of A-share listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen in 2011-2021 as the research sample.The research results show that institutional investors have a positive impact on both environmental investment and internal control of enterprises;Internal control has played a part of the mesomeric effect between institutional investors and enterprise environmental protection investment;Furthermore,from the perspective of environmental investment classification,compared to expensed environmental investment,institutional investors can significantly promote the capitalization of environmental investment by enterprises through internal control;From the perspective of institutional investor heterogeneity,the positive correlation between pressure resistant institutional investors and corporate environmental investment is stronger than that between pressure sensitive institutional investors,and there is no significant impact between pressure uncertain institutional investments and corporate environmental investment;Internal control plays a partial mediating role between pressure resistant and pressure sensitive institutional investors and corporate environmental investment,while there is no mediating role among pressure uncertain institutional investors.Based on the above research conclusions,this article proposes corresponding suggestions from three aspects: improving the structure of institutional investors and actively guiding them to focus on the long-term value development of enterprises,improving the internal control mechanism construction of listed companies,and paying attention to the capitalization of environmental protection investment in enterprises.It also points out the future research direction of this article,in order to provide reference and reference for promoting green management and sustainable development of enterprises.