Digital Inclusive Finance And Corporate ESG

Along with the development of modern investment concepts,digital inclusive finance and corporate ESG have received increasing attention from all sectors of society.This paper argues that digital inclusive finance can promote corporate ESG investment.First,digital inclusive finance can enhance corporate ESG by alleviating financing constraints.digital inclusive finance is fundamentally inclusive finance,which can,to a certain extent,solve the problem of difficult and expensive financing for enterprises.after effectively alleviating the financing constraints of enterprises,their financial performance is improved,and they can increase their investment including ESG.Secondly,digital inclusive finance can enhance ESG by reducing information asymmetry.digital inclusive finance,with the support of digital technology,will make enterprises’ information more transparent and accessible,and the information asymmetry between enterprises and financial institutions will be reduced.after financial institutions efficiently grasp enterprises’ information,their ability to identify credit risks and their willingness to extend credit will increase,which will compel enterprises to enhance their investment in ESG.This will compel enterprises to improve their investment in ESG.Third,with the promotion of national green credit policies,financial institutions will gradually pay attention to the ESG performance of enterprises,and digital inclusive finance will facilitate better external supervision and promotion by enterprise stakeholders,and enterprises will be more proactive in regulating their decision-making and governance.Eventually,due to the push-back mechanism,enterprises will also continuously improve their corporate ESG investment in order to enjoy the dividends brought by digital inclusive finance.To test the above logic,this paper first investigates whether digital inclusive finance can promote corporate ESG through an empirical study based on the relevant data of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2011 to 2020 as the observation sample,and obtains the empirical result that there is a more significant positive relationship between digital inclusive finance and corporate ESG.The findings of this paper remain significant after further controlling for a series of robustness tests such as individual fixed effects,city fixed effects,year fixed effects,individual lagged regressions,and changing the explanatory and explanatory variables.The results remain significant after a series of endogeneity tests such as changing individual lagged regressions,exogenous shock tests,propensity score matched sample regressions,omitting key variables,and Heckman two-stage models.Based on the above benchmark findings,this paper further investigates the moderating effect and impact mechanism of digital inclusive finance on corporate ESG investment.Four moderating variables are selected for the moderating effect analysis,namely the level of regional financialization,corporate internal control,institutional shareholding ratio and corporate nature,to further verify the conclusion that digital inclusive finance can enhance corporate ESG.To further explore in depth how digital inclusive finance promotes corporate ESG investment,in the mechanism analysis,this paper uses WW index to measure financing constraints and absolute value of manipulable accrued profits to measure information asymmetry,and the conclusions obtained indicate that alleviating corporate financing constraints and alleviating corporate information asymmetry are intermediate mechanisms for digital inclusive finance to enhance corporate ESG investment.The value of the research generated by this study is that it will enrich the literature related to the economic effects of digital inclusive finance and corporate ESG,and will provide useful thoughts and prospects on the route of developing digital inclusive finance to effectively enhance corporate ESG in China,and will also help policy makers to design effective regulations.