Research on the Impact of Green Finance on Urban Land Green Utilization Efficiency

Enhancing Urban Land Green Utilization Efficiency (ULGUE) serves as a crucial cornerstone for high-quality urban development. Based on the panel data of Chinese cities from 2010 to 2023, this paper adopts the fixed-effect model, mediation effect model and spatial econometric model to systematically investigate the impacts, internal mechanisms and spatial spillover effects of green finance (GF) on ULGUE. The empirical results indicate that GF significantly improves ULGUE, and this core finding remains valid after a series of robustness and endogeneity tests. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the promotional effect of GF varies across city types. Compared with resource-based cities, central cities and western region cities, GF exerts a more prominent enhancement effect on ULGUE in non-resource cities, non-central cities, and cities in the eastern and central regions. Mechanism tests further reveal that GF optimizes ULGUE by advancing urban industrial ecologization and ecological industrialization. In addition, the positive impact of GF is not limited to local areas; it generates favorable spatial spillover effects on neighboring regions. When the geographical distance exceeds 560 km, such spatial spillover effects gradually converge to zero.