The Impact of Green Finance Policy on Corporate Carbon Emission Efficiency

Under the guidance of the “dual carbon” goals, enhancing carbon emission efficiency is the key to achieving coordinated development of economic growth and environmental protection. This paper takes the green finance reform and innovation pilot zones established in batches since 2017 as a quasi-natural experiment, and uses the multi-period difference-in-differences (DID) method to empirically examine the impact of green finance policies on the carbon emission efficiency of enterprises based on the data of Chinese A-share listed companies on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges from 2013 to 2025. The research finds that green finance policies have significantly improved the carbon emission efficiency of enterprises in the pilot zones, with an average increase of about 5.4 percentage points, equivalent to 8.6 % of the sample mean. This conclusion remains valid after a series of robustness tests. Mechanism analysis indicates that the tightening of financing constraints (forcing effect) and the output of green patents are two core transmission paths, with the estimated indirect effects accounting for approximately 27.8 % and 31.5 % of the total effect, respectively. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the policy effect is more prominent in large-scale enterprises and heavily polluting industries. This paper deepens the understanding of the micro-environmental effects of green finance from the perspective of efficiency, reveals the internal logic of policy implementation, and provides empirical references and decision-making basis for improving the green finance system and driving high-quality low-carbon transformation of enterprises.