Environmental Regulation,Political Connection And Corporate Environmental Protection Investment

"Not only need gold and silver mountains,but also green water and green mountains" is the development concept of our country at this stage,and it also reflects people’s yearning for a better life.At the cost of rapid economic development,my country’s environment has been continuously deteriorating in recent decades,and the degree of environmental pollution has become increasingly serious.The current common understanding of the academic circles is that only the government,the public and enterprises can participate in the treatment of environmental pollution can be effective.Therefore,corporate environmental protection investment has become one of the hotspots of research.The existing research on the factors affecting corporate environmental protection investment mainly focuses on corporate governance,social public supervision and other fields,while the impact of environmental regulation and political connections on corporate environmental investment has not been explored in depth.Environmental control and political connections are the explicit and implicit manifestations of government participation in environmental governance.From the perspective of corporate environmental investment,this paper studies the impact of environmental regulations and political connections on corporate environmental impact,and conducts a robust test based on industry and regional differences.This paper first sorts out the institutional background of environmental protection and the relationship between government and enterprise in my country,and combines Porter hypothesis,rent-seeking theory,and corporate social responsibility theory to construct a theoretical analysis framework of environmental regulation,political connection,corporate social responsibility,and corporate environmental investment relationship.Secondly,the 2015-2019 listed companies in my country’s A-share heavy-polluting industries are selected as research samples to conduct empirical tests on the relationship between environmental regulation,political connections and corporate environmental investment.Through empirical research,this article draws the following conclusions:(1)There is a U-shaped relationship between the intensity of environmental regulation and the scale of corporate environmental investment.Lower control intensity will have a negative impact on the company’s environmental protection investment,and the company lacks the initiative to actively carry out pollution control and environmental protection investment;after the peak,the greater the environmental control intensity,the greater the scale of corporate environmental protection investment.Increase,at this time,the impact of environmental regulation on corporate environmental protection investment is positive.The choice between the cost of penalties for violations of environmental regulations and the cost of compliance reflects the changing mechanism of the "U"-shaped relationship.(2)There is a positive correlation between political connections and corporate environmental investment.With the imperative of environmental governance,politically connected enterprises will continue to maintain and further optimize their relationship with the government and increase the intensity of their environmental investment in order to proactively assume the expected social responsibilities.At the same time,the government will also use tax reductions and investment subsidies as a signal to call on the public to take responsibility.Enterprises with political connections will naturally be more likely to obtain financing and subsidies,thus increasing the scale of environmental protection investment.