Green finance has drawn increased worldwide attention from policymakers as a financial mechanism that could potentially encourage corporations to actively engage in sustainable activities. However, despite a growing body of studies investigating the economic outcomes of green financial policies, there is still a lack of research that systematically quantifies the social welfare implications of green finance. Hence, this study aims to fill this research gap by establishing the causal effect of green finance on corporate environmental responsibility. Exploiting the "bottom-up" enforcement of the green finance pilots in 2017 in China as a quasi-natural experiment and the difference-in-difference-in-difference identification strategy, we find that green finance significantly enhances corporate environmental responsibility performance in high-polluting industries relative to their counterparts, and this evidence continues to survive a battery of robustness checks. Moreover, we explore three underlying mechanisms that possibly explain this beneficial effect: risk-taking, external governance and financing channels. Furthermore, we uncover that corporate environmental responsibility serves as a plausible non-economic channel that combines green finance with economic benefits by stimulating green innovation, promoting total factor productivity and expanding market share. Overall, our study offers new insights on both the economic and non-economic consequences of green finance on business performance.

This paper selects Chinese A-share listed manufacturing companies from 2011 to 2020 as a research sample and analyzes the impact of economic policy uncertainty on business performance. We find that economic policy uncertainty is detrimental to the improvement of business performance; service transformation can significantly offset the adverse effect of economic policy uncertainty on business performance, and this positive effect will increase with the depth of service transformation, Furthermore, embedded service transformation is more effective than mixed service transformation in weaking the adverse effects of economic policy uncertainty on business performance. The results of the heterogeneity test show that the negative relationship between economic policy uncertainty and firm business performance, as well as the positive effect of servitization transformation, is more noticeable in non-state-owned enterprises and low sale growth firms. The results are robust after various specifications of variables, possible endogeneity issues, and more control variables are considered.

Insurance was one of industries that were opened very first after China’s accession to the WTO in 2001. During 2002 to 2005, there was a peak of the foreign insurers’ entry, with the rapid growth of their market share. However, in recent years, the foreign insurers found themselves not able to grow as fast as they have expected, which was described as their “Seven Year Itch” in China. Several cases of equity transactions have taken place in 2009-2010, mainly involved with the foreign insurers reducing their shareholdings. This was regarded as the sign of foreign insurers changing their strategies in Chinese market. In this paper we found strong evidence to show that the current performance of foreign insurers in China was relatively worse than that in the other major insurance markets. From the comparison of the regulatory environment and market performance, we can say for sure that regulation restrictions should be at least one of the major reasons for the current situation. Also we found that the “50-50” shareholding structure which was adopted initially by many life foreign insurers could be blamed for the slow growth recently. And poor bancassurance business performance could explain the shareholding reductions recently for some of the foreign life insurers.