Beschreibung:
Debate has long prevailed as to whether the financial sectors can enhance energy efficiency. We attempt to provide new insight into this debate from the perspective of commercial bank branches expansion. This paper manually collects the longitude and latitude of commercial bank branches and manufacturing firms in China, and constructs multiple bank branches expansion variables at firm level. Then, by utilizing Environmental Survey and Reporting database, Annual Survey of Industrial Firms and firm-level patent application dataset from 1998 to 2009, this paper empirically examines the impact of commercial bank branches expansion on firms’ energy efficiency for the first time and discusses the potential impact channels from the perspective of credit supply-side and demand-side. We find that the commercial bank branches expansion within the radius of 10 kilometers of firms has improved the manufacturing firms’ energy efficiency. Furthermore, we also confirm there exists multiple heterogeneous nexuses between the bank branches expansion and energy efficiency. Finally, the financial availability caused by the bank branches expansion is not able to affect the energy efficiency whereas the bank competition will increase the energy efficiency. Also, the bank branches expansion increases the energy efficiency through promoting the capital renewal instead of technological innovation