关键词: 僵尸企业, 工业污染排放强度, 主成分分析, 空间计量模型

Abstract: The majority of the literature about zombie firms pay more attention to how to identify them and why they exist. However, it is still relatively rare to investigate the negative effects of the zombie firms using empirical methods. Under the context of China’s increasing environmental management pressure, this paper examines the negative effect of zombie firms from the perspective of industrial pollution intensity. Based on Chinese industrial enterprise database as well as the provincial panel data, this paper finds that the higher the assets ratio of the zombie firms in one province is, the higher the intensity of industrial pollution emissions will be. This conclusion is robust to several test, such as applying the principle component analysis to diversity industrial pollutants, and taking the spatial interaction among Chinese provinces into the basic econometric model. This paper also explores the channels through which those zombie firms can enhance the industrial pollution intensity. We confirm that, a high level of assets ratio of zombie firms’ act as a harmful factor to the industrial pollution reduction investment, marketization progress index and profit rate of the private enterprises. Unfortunately, these three aspects are conducive to decrease provincial pollution intensity. Therefore, Chinese governments should continue to promote the financial system reform actively, and this will be helpful to eliminate the zombie firms drastically. At the same time, they need to take some decisive measures to dispose those zombie firms appropriately.

Key words: Zombie Firms, Industrial Pollution Intensity, Principal Component Analysis, Spatial Econometric Model