Research on Green Productivity of Chinese Real Estate Companies—Based on SBM-DEA and TOBIT Models

Apart from promoting social-economic development and increasing social employment, the real estate industry in China has also brought up problems such as high energy consumption and high emissions. Scholars now focus more on energy conservation, emission reduction and sustainable development of real estate companies in their current research. The data used by this paper are three-year panel data from 2015 to 2018, with observations from 15 representative real estate companies. CO₂ and green credit index are introduced as the undesirable output and the green output of real estate companies respectively. First, with the DEA model and the Malmquist index model, this paper evaluates the green productivity of real estate companies statically and dynamically. The Tobit model is then employed by the author to analyze factors that may affect green productivity. Our results indicate that (1) the green productivities of 15 Chinese real estate companies have improved by various degrees. The average green productivity rises from 0.701 in 2015 to 0.849 in 2018, indicating that the energy utilization rate of enterprises has gradually increased. From the calculation and decomposition of the Malmquist total factor productivity index, we know that technological progress is vital in improving the green productivity of real estate companies. (2) As for the influencing factors, the green productivity is positively related to factors such as policy compliance indicator P, environmental responsibility commitment indicator R, indicator of green innovation capability I, and indicator of green development information disclosure M. The asset-liability ratio on the contrary has a negative impact on green productivity. It’s worth to point out that the green innovation index and green productivity is significantly correlated and the correlation coefficient can be up to 0.636, which implies that the key to improving green productivity is to increase research and development investment.