PurposeThe paper assesses the moderating function of institutions in the financial development and environmental nexus covering India for the time period 1980–2019.Design/methodology/approachDeviating from extant literature which has mostly used emissions of major greenhouse gasses as a measure of environmental quality, the present study uses a broad measure of environmental quality called ecological footprint (EFP). Financial development is measured using a robust proxy recently introduced by International Monetary Fund (IMF). This index is multifaceted and covers three broad dimensions of financial sector in terms of depth, efficiency and access of both financial institutions and markets, thus outperforming the exclusively bank-based measures used in the past literature. Further institutional quality index is generated using the data from international country risk guide. Finally, autoregressive distributed lag model is used for the empirical estimation of short-run and long-run results.FindingsThe empirical estimates reveal that financial development and institutional quality are good for long-run environmental sustainability of India, whereas economic growth degrades the environment in the long- run. The results also attest to the existence of pollution heaven hypothesis in India for long run. Furthermore, regarding the moderating role of institutions, the study reveals that institutional quality complements financial development in affecting environment in the short run. While as, in the long run, they play a substitutive role whereby sound institutions cover-up the inefficiencies in financial system.Research limitations/implicationsFirst, the paper uses the index of financial development developed by the IMF in order to quantify the level of financial development in India overtime. The index is based on three key dimensions of financial development such as the depth, efficiency and access of both financial institutions and markets. However, the index completely neglects the role of financial stability in determining financial development. Thus, future studies that are based on this IMF introduced index of financial development should incorporate the stability dimension to it. Second, this empirical study focused exclusively on India and employed aggregate EFP to measure environmental quality. Further studies can complement the content of this research by conducting similar studies to capture country-specific characteristics of other emerging economies and also scrutinize the impact on the six sub-indices of EFP.Practical implicationsThe results of the study reveal that the effect of financial development, and institutions on ecological footprint is sensitive to time dynamics. Moreover, the findings offer important policy implications to government and policy makers in India on how to curb the menace of environmental degradation.Originality/valueThe paper addresses the gap in the literature by examining the moderating role of institutional quality in the financial development and ecological footprint nexus in India. Furthermore, the authors employ a robust proxy for both financial development and environmental quality unlike extant studies on India.

Women’s participation and technological innovation have a crucial role in ensuring ecological stability and environmental sustainability in the long-run. However, their relationship with environmental sustainability is an ongoing debate with diverse opinions across the continuum. The present study focuses on the empirical relevance of this debate based on the theoretical underpinnings of ecofeminism and techno-centrism, using panel data on 37 OECD countries for the period 1990–2019. The paper employs the Pedroni test to check for cointegration among the variables, Pooled Mean Group (PMG) to estimate the model, and the Dumitrescu-Hurlin test to investigate the pairwise causality among the variables. The study constructs two models, based on ecofeminism and techno-centrism and finds that both gender employment equality and R&D expenditure, which represent the ecofeminist and techno-centric arguments respectively, have a negative and significant impact on environmental degradation measured by the ecological footprint. This suggests that equality of women in the labour markets and technological innovation through R&D expenditure are both potential tools for ensuring environmental sustainability. The empirical estimation also confirms the existence of an N-shaped environmental Kuznets curve between economic growth and environmental degradation in the case of selected OECD countries in both ecofeminist and techno-centric models.