Through the use of 30 provincial panel datasets covering the years from 2013 to 2017, on the basis of constructing the regional green development indicator system, this paper used the fixed-base range entropy weight method to measure the regional green development level. The difference-in-differences model was used to test the policy effect, the mechanism of the establishment of the green financial reform, and the innovation pilot zone on green development. The results showed that: (1) the establishment of the pilot zone promotes regional green development and shows regional differences; (2) under the guidance of policies, the provinces that set up the pilot zone affect the level of regional green development mainly through the upgrading of industrial structure and technological innovation; further research has found (3) a high level of financial investment in environmental protection and marketization, which will help the pilot zone to further play a positive role in promoting the green development of the region. The results of this article indicated that China should continue to expand the scope of green finance reform and innovation pilot zones and make reasonable arrangements among regions according to local conditions to explore new ways of promoting green development. At the same time, the government should actively play the role of green finance in the pilot zone to promote industrial structure upgrading and technological innovation and guide market players to establish green development concepts to gradually build an environmentally friendly, circular model economy to enhance the overall green development capacity of the region.

Green credit is regarded as an important means to promote sustainable growth. Based on the provincial panel dataset of China from 2007 to 2017, this paper investigates the dual impacts of green credit on the economy and environment, and it establishes mediating effect models to analyze the Porter hypothesis. The results show that the green credit policy significantly improves economic performance and reduces pollutant emissions. The above results are robust to employing methods with alternative variables and instrumental variables. Second, the green credit policy contributes to innovation; that is, the green credit increases the innovation scale and improves innovation efficiency. The results of mediating effect models suggest that the Porter effect of green credit can be achieved by improving innovation efficiency. The findings of the current study indicate that the green credit policy helps achieve the win–win situation for economic goals and environmental targets.

We explore the impact of financial friction on resource misallocation and total factor productivity (TFP) of China. First, the mathematical models are derived to clarify the mechanism and consequence of resource misallocation, showing that financial friction leads to resource mismatch, and thus results in the loss of TFP. Second, taking the dataset of China as the research sample, we establish econometric models to explore the impacts of financial friction on resource allocation and TFP. The results show that financial friction has negative impact on the TFP of China. In addition, the friction of financial markets will lead to factor distortion. Furthermore, the results of mechanism analysis demonstrate that resource misallocation is an important channel through which financial friction deteriorates the TFP of China, which is verified at the enterprise and province levels, respectively.