data

Our study is based on data from Chinese A-share listed companies for the period 2017–2022. The firm-year panel dataset includes financial and environmental variables, along with annual information on green factory certification. The data are drawn from five main sources: green factory certification data provided by the MIIT in China; a hand-collected dataset on political connections; financial data from the CSMAR and Wind financial databases; environmental performance information from annual reports and the Enterprise Tax Survey Dataset published by the Chinese State Administration of Tax. After excluding firms in the financial sector and those with ‘ST’ status, our final sample comprises 22,732 firm-year observations.