Green innovation is a key solution to resource depletion and natural environment deterioration. It is advancing the march toward marrying business with sustainability worldwide. Embodying green elements in core innovative activities naturally becomes the critical information for the external assessments of organizations. To identify this information channel effect, the current study is intended for shedding light on the effects of financial analysts, a prominent and professional stakeholder group, on corporate green innovation. Combining the comprehensive incoPat database with the data of Chinese publicly listed manufacturing firms over the period from 2003 to 2017, the empirical results show that analyst coverage could significantly improve firms’ green innovation performance. It is also observed both institutional ownership and stock liquidity significantly enhance the positive relationship between analyst coverage and corporate green innovation. The information-based mechanisms are further identified by the split sample analysis based on the quality of financial information, when either the choice of audit company or the disclosure quality rank is applied. These findings provide beneficial supports for the idea that leaning on the monitoring from the financial analysts, managers could be encouraged to promote green investment with its long-time horizon and correct the myopia that overly focuses on short-term performance.

Addressing critical ecological issues is one of the core objectives of the Chinese National New-type Urbanization Plan (NTU). However, there is not enough research to clearly demonstrate NTU's impact on environmental pollution. There is a need to provide solid empirical evidence from evaluation of the effects of NTU on environmental pollution. This study implements a series of propensity score matching and difference-in-difference analyses based on a comprehensive panel dataset spanning the period 2006-2017. The quantitative results show that NTU is largely conducive to curbing environmental pollution, with PM_2.5 concentrations as a proxy, and its robustness is demonstrated by the parallel trend test and placebo test. Further, the ecological effect of NTU is heterogeneous in terms of city level, location, and former pollution level. Small and medium cities benefit more than larger or central cities from NTU, and eastern cities exhibit better air quality improvement than cities in western regions. In addition, through quantile regression, we find that the positive outcomes of NTU are restricted by level of pollution, i.e., heavier pollution adds greatly to the difficulty of abatement.