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© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

In this article, we investigated changes in public firms’ attitudes towards environmental protection in 2018–2021 in China. We crawled the firm–investor Q&A record on the website of East Money, extracted the carbon- and environment-related corpus, and then applied the sentiment analysis method of NLP (natural language processing) to calculate the sentiment weight of each firm-level record to estimate the attitude before and after towards carbon reduction. We found that there were significant changes in firms’ attitudes towards carbon reduction and environmental protection after the COVID-19 pandemic and the implementation of environment-related policies. We also found a heterogeneous effect of the attitude in different industries. In addition, we built several models to examine the relationship between a firm’s carbon reduction attitude and its financial performance. We found that: A goal with consequent specific policies can raise the positive attitudes of firms toward carbon reduction topics; firms’ attitudes toward ecological topics are different from industry to industry, which means that there are different needs and situations in the trend of carbon reduction from industry to industry. COVID-19 influenced firms’ attitudes toward carbon reduction and environmental protection, calling back the classic dilemma or trilemma of economic growth, carbon reduction, and energy consumption or, perhaps, epidemic control today. The stock situation also influenced the attitude toward environmental protection.

Details

Title
China’s Public Firms’ Attitudes towards Environmental Protection Based on Sentiment Analysis and Random Forest Models
Author
Cai, Li 1 ; Li, Luyu 2   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Zheng, Jiaqi 3 ; Wang, Jizhi 4 ; Yuan, Yi 5 ; Lv, Zezhong 6 ; Wei, Yinghao 7 ; Han, Qihang 8 ; Gao, Jiatong 9 ; Liu, Wenhao 10 

 School of Business Administration, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200241, China; [email protected] 
 School of Professional Studies, Columbia University, New York, NY 10019, USA 
 International College, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100091, China; [email protected] 
 School of Economics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China; [email protected] 
 School of Environment and Energy, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China; [email protected] 
 School of Economics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China; [email protected] 
 Kogod School of Business, American University, Washington, DC 20016, USA; [email protected] 
 Research Institute of Economics and Management, South Western University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu 611130, China; [email protected] 
 School of Competitive Sports, Beijing Sport University, Beijing 100084, China; [email protected] 
10  Guanghua School of Management, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China; [email protected] 
First page
5046
Publication year
2022
Publication date
2022
Publisher
MDPI AG
e-ISSN
20711050
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2663116470
Copyright
© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.