Research On The Influence Of Central Environmental Supervision On Enterprise Investment Behavior

For a long time,China has been constantly exploring environmental governance,promulgating a series of environmental policies to reduce the high pollution behavior of enterprises and encourage enterprises to carry out pollution control.In 2015,China passed the "Environmental Protection Supervision Program(Trial)",which changed the direction of environmental governance from "inspecting enterprises" to "simultaneously inspecting and supervising,with administration as the main task".The environmental inspectors are targeting provincial party committees and governments,which for the first time are simultaneously responsible for the environment in their regions.The appointment and removal of leading cadres are closely related to the results of environmental inspectors in their jurisdiction.In this context,this paper takes the central environmental supervision as the natural experiment and A-share listed companies in the supervised provinces from 2010 to 2019 as the research object.The difference-in-difference method is used to analyze the influence of central environmental supervision on enterprise investment behavior.Based on the property right nature of enterprises,enterprise scale and regional economic development level,the cross-sectional heterogeneity of central environmental supervision was explored.The results show that:(1)Central environmental supervision can significantly restrain the investment level of heavy polluting enterprises and has a good sustainability in the time;(2)Central environmental supervision can significantly restrain excessive investment of heavy polluting enterprises and improve investment efficiency.The above conclusions are still valid after solving the applicability of the method.(3)Further analysis shows that financing constraints are one of the important ways for central environmental inspectors to influence the investment behavior of enterprises.In addition,the results of cross-sectional heterogeneity analysis show that:first,the central environmental supervision mainly inhibits the investment level of state-owned heavy polluting enterprises and the excessive investment behavior of non-state-owned heavy polluting enterprises.Second,central environmental inspectors have consistently held back investment by large polluting firms.For large and non-large heavy polluting enterprises,the investment efficiency is significantly improved.Third,compared with regions with lower levels of regional economic development,the inhibiting effect of central environmental supervision on the investment level of heavy polluting enterprises,the inhibiting effect of excessive investment and the improving effect of investment efficiency are more obvious in regions with higher levels of economic development.This study can evaluate the implementation effect of the central environmental supervision policy from the perspective of enterprise investment behavior,thus providing ideas for the formulation of environmental policies in China.In addition,it can also help heavy polluting enterprises to better adapt to environmental supervision policies and make optimal investment decisions in combination with external environmental policies and their own conditions.