Green governance structure, ownership characteristics, and corporate financing constraints

Existing studies on firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) have mainly focused on specific behavior levels aimed at exchanging resources, and have not paid adequate attention to long-term social responsibility orientation and top-level institutional design level. To address this gap, the present study first builds an evaluation system of the green governance structure based on green ideas, values, strategy, and organization arrangement from the perspective of top-level institutional design, and creates a green governance structure index. Chinese listed companies in 2015–2017 are taken as examples to investigate the relationship between green governance structure level and corporate financial constraints. Through empirical analysis, this study finds that firms with better green governance structure face lower financing constraints. Taking into consideration the effect of ownership characteristics, the shareholding ratio of institutional investors and the degree of equity balance are both found to further strengthen the negative impact of green governance structure level on financing constraints. An extensive analysis revealed that regional economic development and law environment may promote the relationship between green governance structure and firms’ financial constraints. This novel paper enriches the existing theoretical studies on green governance, and it offers a new way for firms to gain financing support that has extensive theoretical and practical significance.