This paper innovatively applies a spatial lagged model to investigate the consequences of the devolution of environmental regulation in the absence of knowledge-based, sustainability-oriented nested institutions. Chinese provinces are taken as self-organising social groups sharing a common resource of air quality. The spatial measurement shows that air quality has a positive spatial spillover effect on neighbouring provinces. Due to a tragedy-of-the-commons vicious cycle, however, the estimated direct, indirect and overall spatial spillover effects of the provinces’ self-regulation practices on the common resource are all negative. That is, local regulations through investments for waste gas treatment exert paradoxical counter-productive effect on common resource of air quality in the local province and neighbouring provinces. These findings confirm that, in the absence of nested institutions that are based on system-level, sustainability-oriented knowledge management, even commons-protecting actions at individual provincial level may result in jeopardised common resources at the system level.

Regarding the financial support provided to micro and small enterprises (MSEs), deciding whether to prioritize economic benefit or social responsibility is a crucial policy choice, especially in developing countries. This paper establishes a new research framework for density of enterprise output value and wages conditional on loans to balance economic benefit (sales revenue) and social responsibility (employee payroll). Using data on 9125 Chinese enterprises from January 2015 to December 2017, this paper shows that loans have a range effect on sales revenue and employee payroll, which ascends gradually to a plateau and eventually descends. Based on this finding, this paper proposes a reallocation scheme. With total loans unchanged, fixed sales revenue can increase employee payroll by 3.8%. Similarly, fixed employee payroll can increase sales revenue by 5.2%. This study not only provides empirical evidence for financially supporting MSEs, but also provides alternative decision support for policy design.

The phenomenon of crowdfunding has been widely studied, while the sustainability of crowdfunded ventures is attracting growing interest from academia and society. In light of this interest, we conducted bibliometric analysis to study the relationship between crowdfunding and crowdfunded ventures' sustainability orientation. We analyzed the number of publications, type of publications, and most productive countries, journals, and authors. We also analyzed the most cited articles and examined their approach to sustainability and crowdfunding. The results suggested that a sustainability orientation could bring about change in the current financial and environmental system.

In recent years, social movements have echoed calls for greater social and environmental responsibility. Although financial institutions promote development, consumers have lost confidence in banks. As we enter the Fintech era, banks have the opportunity to use new tools that enable greater transparency for customers. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) plays a key role in increasing social awareness of regulators, society, shareholders, and employees-in short, stakeholders. This study therefore focuses on banks that have designed their activities and investments to contribute to sustainability. The principal contribution of this paper is to show the existence of a range of business models that arise following different responses by different types of banks. These different responses occur because the primary objective of sustainable banks is to meet the needs of stakeholders and contribute to sustainable development, whereas conventional banks simply apply and execute CSR policies. It is possible to differentiate between ethical banks and commercial banks. To ensure economic progress and achieve sustainability, it is fundamental to balance economic profitability with people's social and environmental aspirations.