Multi-timescale resilience of China's green finance market to climate policy uncertainty shock: Does environmental policy stringency matter?

This paper studies the resilience of China's green finance market to Chinese Climate Policy Uncertainty (CCPU) shock across multiple time scales. Resilience is measured using the Intensity Resilience of Risk Absorption (IRRA) and Duration Resilience of Risk Absorption (DRRA). Green bond, new energy, clean energy and ESG markets are selected as representative sectors of green finance, with the analysis covering the period from January 3, 2017 to December 30, 2022. The study further explores how Chinese Environmental Policy Stringency (CEPS) influences the green finance market's resilience against CCPU. The result reveals that, firstly, the resilience of China's green finance market exhibits notable time-varying characteristics, with both resistance to and recovery speed from CCPU shock showing gradual improvement over time. Second, the green bond market demonstrates the strongest IRRA across all time scales, while DRRA is shortest in the green bond, ESG and clean energy markets under short-, medium- and long-term time scales, respectively. Third, as time scales lengthen, China's green finance market becomes more sensitive to CCPU shock and less resilient. Additionally, returns in the green bond and ESG markets are more susceptible to their long-term IRRA. Finally, greater CEPS and market-based CEPS reduce the IRRA of China's green finance market to CCPU shock while increasing DRRA in the short term. This study offers important implications for Chinese environmental management, emphasizing the need for short-term adaptability, medium-term flexibility, and long-term resilience-building to balance green finance market stability with sustainable development goals.