The Effect Of Corporate Green Investment With Political Relevancy And Environmental Information Publicity

Since the reform and opening-up,China’s economy has continued to develop at a high speed,and the process of industrialization has progressed steadily.However,the resulting environmental pollution has gradually emerged and has become an important factor hindering China’s economic transformation and industrial upgrading.Under this circumstance,the central government has successively formulated a series of pollution control and environmental protection policy in an attempt to institutionally limit the pollution discharge and disorderly expansion of polluting enterprises.However,due to the long-standing government-enterprise connection phenomenon in Chinese society,the economic growth goals of local governments and the profit maximization goals of enterprises are highly overlapped.Under the condition of opaque corporate environmental pollution information,problems such as pollution protection and regulatory slack are prone to occur,resulting in Environmental protection policy are difficult to achieve the expected results.Then,after making corporate environmental pollution information transparent through policy means,can it effectively curb the collusion of government and enterprise in environmental governance? What is the mechanism of the environmental information disclosure policy? How does the attribute of political connections of enterprise affect the effectiveness of the environmental information disclosure policy?Researches on these issues have certain theoretical value and practical significance for improving the ecological environment and enhancing the ability of environmental governance.Based on the research results of the existing literature,we construct a theoretical model of the impact of environmental information disclosure policy on corporate environmental investment behavior from the perspective of corporate decision-making.Then,based on the implementation of "Guidelines for Information Disclosure Content and Formats of Companies Offering Public Securities No.2(Revised in 2016)" as a quasi-natural experiment,the Difference-in-Differences(DID)model was used to empirically test the enterprises changes in environmental investment behavior of enterprises with different politically related attributes under the implementation of the environmental information disclosure policy.Finally,the mechanism of environmental information disclosure policy is discussed from the aspects of government environmental protection expenditure,government intervention,environmental protection subsidies and tax incentives.The research results show that the implementation of the environmental information disclosure policy has effectively improved the green investment level of enterprises.Among them,the green investment level of politically connected enterprises has increased more greatly,and the green investment level is also higher.The green investment behavior of politically connected companies is closely related to the characteristics of local governments.In areas with serious government intervention and high environmental investment expenditures,the environmental information disclosure policy has a more obvious effect on the green investment level of politically-connected enterprises;after the implementation of the policy,the local government has supported the green investment behavior of politically-connected enterprises through environmental protection subsidies and tax incentives,which formed a significant government-enterprise cooperation effect.The results show that the environmental information disclosure policy effectively activates the effect of government-enterprise cooperation between enterprises and the government.Compared with the implementation of an “one size fits all” reform for the phenomenon of government-enterprise linkages,establishing a long-term government-enterprise cooperation mechanism through appropriate system design may be more conducive to the improvement of China’s environmental governance ability.