The Effect of Green Finance on Consumers’ Willingness to Pay: Empirical Evidence from China

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-777-4_77How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Green finance; Consumers’ willingness to pay; China; Green invention; Regional heterogeneity

Abstract

Existing research on green finance is mainly based on the enterprise-level outcomes, such as green innovation and green transformation. Research on consumers’ willingness to pay typically focuses on individual-level surveys. However, there is limited evidence regarding whether the development of green finance is related to consumer demand. This study provides new evidence on how the development of green finance is associated with consumers’ willingness to pay by employing the baseline fixed-effects model, heterogeneity test, and mediation-based mechanism analysis to examine this linkage. Based on city-level panel data from 2013 to 2019 in China, the empirical results are as follows: (1) The development of green finance is positively associated with consumers’ willingness to pay. (2) The effect of green finance is stronger in cities with younger demographic structures and higher levels of human capital, while the effect is negative in low-income cities. (3) The mechanism results show that green availability, marketisation, and green attention could strengthen the marginal effect of green finance development. In light of the findings, policymakers may consider the different impacts arising from regional differences, as well as improving the availability of green products, market transparency, and consumer awareness to transform green finance into consumer-side demand better.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Hanze Liu
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/30
TI  - The Effect of Green Finance on Consumers’ Willingness to Pay: Empirical Evidence from China
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 8th International Conference on Economic Management and Cultural Industry (ICEMCI 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 750
EP  - 763
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-777-4_77
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-777-4_77
ID  - Liu2026
ER  -