China's Public Firms' Attitudes towards Environmental Protection Based on Sentiment Analysis and Random Forest Models

In this article, we investigated changes in public firms' attitudes towards environmental protection in 2018-2021 in China. We crawled the firm-investor Q&A record on the website of East Money, extracted the carbon- and environment-related corpus, and then applied the sentiment analysis method of NLP (natural language processing) to calculate the sentiment weight of each firm-level record to estimate the attitude before and after towards carbon reduction. We found that there were significant changes in firms' attitudes towards carbon reduction and environmental protection after the COVID-19 pandemic and the implementation of environment-related policies. We also found a heterogeneous effect of the attitude in different industries. In addition, we built several models to examine the relationship between a firm's carbon reduction attitude and its financial performance. We found that: A goal with consequent specific policies can raise the positive attitudes of firms toward carbon reduction topics; firms' attitudes toward ecological topics are different from industry to industry, which means that there are different needs and situations in the trend of carbon reduction from industry to industry. COVID-19 influenced firms' attitudes toward carbon reduction and environmental protection, calling back the classic dilemma or trilemma of economic growth, carbon reduction, and energy consumption or, perhaps, epidemic control today. The stock situation also influenced the attitude toward environmental protection.