China’s Public Firms’ Attitudes towards Environmental Protection Based on Sentiment Analysis and Random Forest Models

Cai Li, Luyu Li, Jiaqi Zheng, Jizhi Wang, Yi Yuan, Zezhong Lv, Yinghao Wei, Qihang Han, Jiatong Gao and Wenhao Liu
Additional contact information
Cai Li: School of Business Administration, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200241, China
Luyu Li: School of Professional Studies, Columbia University, New York, NY 10019, USA
Jiaqi Zheng: International College, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100091, China
Jizhi Wang: School of Economics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China
Yi Yuan: School of Environment and Energy, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
Zezhong Lv: School of Economics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
Yinghao Wei: Kogod School of Business, American University, Washington, DC 20016, USA
Qihang Han: Research Institute of Economics and Management, South Western University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu 611130, China
Jiatong Gao: School of Competitive Sports, Beijing Sport University, Beijing 100084, China
Wenhao Liu: Guanghua School of Management, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 9, 1-27

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.

Keywords: CO 2 emission reduction; sentiment analysis of China’s public firms; carbon reduction sentiment weight prediction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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