The environmental-financial nexus: Centralized environmental monitoring, eco-consciousness, and green revenues
利用中国2015年环境监测中央化作为准自然实验，发现高生态意识企业相比低生态意识企业在政策后获得了更多绿色收入，实现了环境与经济双赢。
Amid tightening environmental governance, we examine whether and how firms’ eco-consciousness leads to a harmonious balance between environmental and economic performance in the form of green revenues. We utilize China's centralization of environmental monitoring in 2015 as the basis for a difference-in-differences methodology, using highly and less eco-conscious firms as the treatment and control groups. We find that relative to less eco-conscious firms, highly eco-conscious firms derive greater green revenues post-centralization. This finding is robust to underlying firm characteristics and unobservable industry- and time-specific heterogeneity. Regional internet infrastructure development and corporate greenwashing mitigation facilitate the effect on highly eco-conscious firms’ green revenues, suggesting that effective centralized monitoring relies on an integrated information transmission network and an improvement in firms’ genuine environmental accountability. Overall, eco-consciousness facilitates a win-win scenario between environmental and economic performance under an increasingly strict environmental regulatory landscape.