Does Green Finance Make Urban Growth Cleaner? Evidence from China’s Pilot Zones Using Night-Time Lights, Air Pollution, and Carbon Emissions

China’s 2017 Green Finance Reform and Innovation Pilot Zones provide a setting for asking whether financial reform is followed by cleaner urban growth. We use a 2012–2020 city panel combining EOAtlas night-time lights, annual PM2.5 concentration, prefecture-level CO2 emissions, and two light-based relative measures in a two-way fixed-effects difference-in-differences model. Night-time light enters as ln(light), making the PM2.5 and CO2 relative measures exact log contrasts between environmental pressure and observed activity. The core sample contains 246 cities, only four treated. Baseline coefficients are −0.028 for night-time light, 0.055 for PM2.5, 0.071 for CO2, 0.082 for the PM2.5 relative-pressure contrast, and 0.099 for carbon intensity; all 95% confidence intervals include zero. Results remain similar with alternative fixed effects, a drop-2012 check, treatment-mapping adjustments, and literature-aligned specifications. City-specific synthetic controls are heterogeneous and show no common cleaner-growth effect. Joint pre-policy tests reject equality for four of five outcomes, and power is limited for moderate effects. Under this design, we find no robust evidence that the reform reduced environmental pressure relative to observed activity, but the estimates are too imprecise and trend-sensitive to support a zero-effect conclusion.