Rapid urbanization has provided a strong impetus for the economic growth of China, but it has also caused many problems such as inefficient urban land use and environmental pollution. With the popularization of the concept of green and sustainable development, the Environmental-Social-Governance (ESG) assessment concept is widely accepted. The government and residents are paying more and more attention to environmental issues in urban development, and environmental protection has formed an important part of urban development. In this context, this study takes 26 cities in the Yangtze River Delta as examples to build an evaluation system for urban land-use efficiency under green development orientation. The evaluation system takes into account the inputs of land, capital, labor, and energy factors in the process of urban development. Based on emphasizing economic output, the social benefits and undesired outputs brought about by urban development are taken into account. This paper measures urban land use efficiency by the super-efficiency SBM model, and on this basis, analyses the spatial-temporal evolution characteristics of urban land-use efficiency. Further, this paper measures urban land use efficiency without considering undesired outputs and compares the two evaluation methods. Again, the comparison illustrates the rationality of urban land use efficiency evaluation system under green development orientation.

Innovation is the primary driving force for development and the core of green, healthy, and sustainable economic development. This paper researches the spatial effect of absorptive capacity on regional innovation capacity from the perspective of knowledge spillover. We use the seven dimensions such as R & D intensity to build an absorptive capacity index evaluation system. After statistical verification, we select the most suitable empirical model, the dynamic Spatial Durbin Model with two-way fixed effect. The empirical results show that: (1) The promotion effect of absorptive capacity on knowledge spillovers in one province has no obvious effect on innovation promotion in other provinces, especially provinces at similar economic levels. However, it tends to inhibit the innovation development of neighboring provinces. (2) The impact of absorptive capacity on promoting knowledge spillovers varies from region to region. The eastern provinces of China are not affected by the absorptive capacity of neighboring provinces. The regression results of the central and western regions are not substantially different from the full sample. This study puts forward some policy suggestions based on the empirical results. It shows that a higher absorptive capacity does not mean better performance. The Chinese government should thus promote innovation in different provinces according to the local conditions.

This article explains the impact of the board secretary’s financial experience on the financing preference from the perspectives of executive behavior and psychology. We use small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) listed on China’s National Equities Exchange and Quotations (NEEQ) market as an empirical research sample and confirm that SMEs who have board secretaries with financial experience prefer external financing, thus lowering the investment-cash flow sensitivity. Additionally, the empirical conclusions are robust after changing the measurement of financing, expanding the scope of financial experience definition, and removing state-owned SMEs from the sample for robustness testing. We also control for the endogeneity using a placebo test, PSM-DID, and instrumental variables. In further research, we find that overconfident secretaries prefer external financing; secretaries with financial experience can reduce information asymmetry to promote external financing, albeit mostly short-term loans.

In recent years, urbanization has been developing rapidly. However, it is also accompanied by land management problems, such as low land use efficiency. In this research, we manage to explore the temporal and spatial evolution laws as well as characteristics of the coupling and coordinated development between urbanization and land use benefits. Through this, it is possible for us to provide policy recommendations for the sustainable development of the urbanization in Fujian Province. In this study, we take prefecture-level municipal districts and county-level cities in Fujian as the research subject. We construct an index system, based on data in 2002, 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2017, to evaluate the urban land use benefits and urbanization. Besides, we leverage the Gini coefficient weighting method to give weight to each index and calculate the value of its benefits. Moreover, it is the relative development degree and the coupling coordination degree model that we comprehensively leverage to study the spatiotemporal evolution law of the coupling coordination degree (CCD). The results show that: (1) Urban land use benefits and urbanization level are positively correlated with the regional administrative level and economic development status; (2) The CCD of urban land use benefits and urbanization level in various regions of Fujian is still low. However, the overall development direction is good; (3) From the perspective of spatial distribution, the CCD owns a “center-periphery” pattern that is based on the law of diminishing CCD power from three central cities of Fuzhou, Xiamen, and Sanming. Consequently, it requires governments to take action. Firstly, they should promote the intensive land use in the urbanization process. Meanwhile, they should also pay attention to ecological environment protection. Besides, it is recommendable to give full play to the radiating and leading effect of central cities on surrounding ones. Finally, they are required to provide appropriate policies and resource support to peripheral cities.

Social entrepreneurship is an entrepreneurial activity centering on solving social problems and creating social values, which can effectively alleviate the problems of sustainable development such as an excessive gap between the rich and the poor, a lack of resources and so on, and can resolve the “triple failures” of government, the market and public welfare departments to a certain extent. As the subjective attitude of entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial intention can predict a representational incidence rate of entrepreneurial behavior. Therefore, aimed at university students, a special group of entrepreneurs, this paper constructs a theoretical framework of “network embeddedness – sense of opportunity identification efficacy – university students’ social entrepreneurial intention” from the perspective of social cognitive theory through 466 pieces of valid survey data, and uses Stata 14 to construct a multiple linear regression model to explore the mechanism of action between the three. The results show that university students’ sense of opportunity identification efficacy can significantly and positively stimulate their social entrepreneurial intention, and the network embeddedness (network scale and network intensity) of entrepreneurs is also significantly and positively correlated with their sense of opportunity identification efficacy; however, via the hierarchical regression model, it was found that the sense of opportunity identification efficacy can only partially mediate the relationship between network embeddedness and university students’ social entrepreneurial intention, which is mainly manifested in the positive correlation between university students’ social entrepreneurial intention and their network scale, and is unrelated to network intensity. This research contributes to enriching the theory of social entrepreneurial intention and guides the strengthening of university students’ social entrepreneurial intention in reality.

The carbon emission trading system (CETS) is a milestone policy in the history of China’s emission trading system, which is of great significance to China’s realization of “carbon peak and carbon neutralization”. As an important component of sustainable development, LUT should be related to the CETS. However, in the literature on the CETS, little material deals with its impact on land use transition (LUT). This paper will enrich this literature. Based on 30 provincial regions in China from 2011 to 2017, using the DID and entropy methods, this study investigated the impact of CETS on the trend of LUT from three perspectives: economic effects, environmental effects and Porter effects. The conclusions are that (1) the implementation of the CETS hindered economic development, but optimized energy-use efficiency; (2) the implementation of the CETS reduced the emissions of CO₂ and SO₂; (3) the implementation of the CETS did not produce a Porter effect; and (4) the influence of the CETS had the characteristics of a spatial cluster. These findings offer some guidance for improving CETS policies and formulating similar environmental regulation policies.