Professor Hu Jinyan’s Team Publishes Research in Authoritative Journal World Economy

Recently, the research paper Bank Fintech Empowers Green Governance: Evidence from the Improvement of Environmental Information Quality by the team of Professor Hu Jinyan from the School of Economics at Shandong University was published in Issue 12, 2025 of World Economy, an authoritative journal. This paper is one of the phased achievements of the Major Program of the National Social Science Fund of China Research on Financial Structure Optimization and Institutional Innovation to Promote High-quality Development of the Real Economy (Project No. 22&ZD117) and the Key Program of the National Social Science Fund of China Research on Financial Structure Optimization Serving High-quality Economic Development under the New Development Pattern (Project No. 21AZD114). Professor Hu Jinyan is the corresponding author, and the collaborator is Zhang Jingjing from Shandong University of Finance and Economics (2021 doctoral student of the School of Economics).

A good ecological environment is the most inclusive well-being of the people. However, at present, corporate environmental information disclosure still has strategic behaviors such as whitewashing and exaggeration, and the quality of environmental information is low. Therefore, how to coordinate the compatibility between environmental protection and enterprise development and build an endogenous incentive mechanism to improve the quality of environmental information has become an urgent practical problem. As the core of the financial system, banks play a key role in green governance, but information disadvantages weaken the effectiveness of banks' participation in green governance. Fintech provides technical support for strengthening banks' environmental information identification ability and breaking environmental information friction, but it may also distort banks' environmental participation role by intensifying credit competition between large and small banks. Therefore, whether bank fintech can reshape the incentive of corporate environmental information disclosure behavior and empower green governance deserves systematic research.

This paper identifies bank fintech patents through a multi-method cross-verification model of dictionary method, topic method, supervised machine learning, IPC classification number and manual judgment of differences. Based on bank-enterprise matching data, it explores whether bank fintech can and how to improve the quality of environmental information at the level of corporate environmental information whitewashing behavior. The study finds that bank fintech curbs environmental information whitewashing behavior through an information screening mechanism that enables truly green enterprises to obtain credit inclination and a credit punishment mechanism that makes whitewashing enterprises face reduced credit and blocked loan renewal. It shows that while the substantive environmental information remains stable, the amount of environmental text disclosed by enterprises is significantly reduced, exerting an information "quality improvement" effect. Heterogeneity analysis finds that this effect is more significant in areas with fewer fintech companies and non-state-owned enterprises. The expansion discussion shows that peer whitewashing of environmental information weakens enterprises' credit acquisition and green innovation, thus verifying the positive role of the information quality improvement effect of bank fintech in alleviating credit misallocation and stimulating green innovation vitality.