This study expands on the impact of local government environmental regulation on enterprise environmental protection investment. Furthermore, it analyzes the influence promotion pressure of officials has on the scale of enterprise environmental investment. The results show that the environmental protection investment of companies in China is generally insufficient. The attitude of companies toward environmental protection is passive under the policy regulation. The environmental supervision of the government is also still at a low level. Both of these observations are far from the intentions of the government. There is a U-shaped relationship between the pressure of official promotion and the scale of enterprise environmental protection investment. Only when the pressure of official promotion exceeds a certain limit can it positively stimulate enterprises to invest in environmental protection. Environmental regulation also exerts a threshold effect on the environmental protection investment by enterprises. This research provides a new way to understand the decision-making behavior of local officials and the environmental protection responsibility of enterprises. This study provides recommendations for improving the environment appraisal and government supervision system in China.

The innovation efficiency of an enterprise is subject to the behavior of the innovation subject, while the equity pledge behavior of the controlling shareholder not only brings convenience for innovation investment and financing, but also brings risks which has an impact on the innovation output of the enterprise. In this paper, we investigate how equity pledge of controlling shareholders affect the enterprise innovation efficiency using the data of China’s A-share listed companies from 2014 to 2020, and examine the effect of property right structure on the relationship between them from the two dimensions of equity nature and equity concentration. We find that equity pledge of controlling shareholders are signifcantly negatively related to innovation efficiency, meaning that equity pledge inhibits the innovation behavior of enterprises and reduces the innovation efficiency. We further provide evidence to show that the impediment effect of equity pledge of controlling shareholder on enterprise innovation efficiency is more pronounced in non-state-owned enterprises and decentralized equity enterprises. Moreover, our analysis shows that different equity concentration levels have different effects in the process of equity pledge affecting enterprise innovation efficiency and the effect of concentrated equity enterprises is lower than that of decentralized enterprises.

Purpose: Can state-owned equity participation inhibit private enterprises’ greenwashing behavior? If so, what are the mechanisms involved? Is there any difference in the impact of state-owned equity participation on private enterprises’ greenwashing behavior in different contexts? The answers to the above questions not only fill the existing research gaps but also provide new research ideas for greenwashing governance in developing countries. Design/methodology/approach: Using a sample of Chinese A-share listed private enterprises from 2011 to 2022, we examine the impact of state-owned equity participation on private enterprises’ greenwashing behavior. Findings: The results suggest that state-owned equity participation can significantly inhibit private enterprises’ greenwashing behavior. Mechanism analysis shows that state-owned equity participation suppresses private enterprises’ greenwashing behavior by alleviating financing constraints through the resource effect and reducing managerial myopia through the governance effect. Moderating effect analysis indicates that media attention can strengthen the inhibitory effect of state-owned equity participation on private enterprises’ greenwashing behavior. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the inhibitory effect of state-owned equity participation on private enterprises’ greenwashing behavior is more significant in areas with a low degree of marketization and non-heavy-polluting industries. Originality/value: The findings enrich the governance factors of private enterprises’ greenwashing conduct from the standpoint of diverse shareholders, assist developing countries in formulating more specific policy goals and provide important insights into global environmental governance practices.

This article visualizes bank non-performing loans (NPLs) and government debt distress data integration and an outcome classification after the outbreak of European sovereign debt. Linear and functional principal component analysis (FPCA) and biclustering are used to show the clustering pattern of NPLs and government debt for 25 EU and BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) during the period of 2006 to 2017 through high-dimensional visualizations. The results demonstrate that the government debt markets of EU countries experienced a similar trend in terms of NPLs, with a similar size of NPLs across debt markets. Through visualization, we find that the government debt and NPLs of EU and BRICS countries increased drastically after the crisis, and crisis countries are contagious. However, the impact of the Greek debt crisis is lower for non-crisis countries, because the debt markets of these countries are decoupled from the Greek market. We also find that sovereign debtors in the EU countries have much closer fiscal linkages than BRICS countries. The level of crisis in the EU countries will be higher than that in the BRICS countries if crisis is driven by the common shocks of macroeconomic fundamentals.

We investigate the tail dependence between sovereign debt distress and bank non-performing loans (NPLs) using a large sample of developed and emerging countries in recent decades. Considering the feedback loop of sovereign debt and bank loan distress, we use three copula models to analyze the asymmetry of tail dependence structure between sovereign debt exposure and bank NPLs. We use the Gaussian copula marginal regression to control the concurrent impact of other macroeconomic variables. We provide evidence that sovereign debt indicates an important determinant of NPLs. We also find that there is tail dependence between sovereign debt distress and bank NPLs, whereas the tail dependence coefficients vary across countries. Our findings shed light on the influence of fiscal distress on bank loan distress and provide immediate implications for the design of macro prudential and financial policy.