“Pollutant Discharge Fee Replaced With Environmental Protection Taxes” Affect On Corporate Investment Efficiency

China’s pollutant discharge fee has been implemented since 1982 and it partly has promoted environmental protection.But with the change of external environment,its disadvantages are increasingly exposed.In order to guide enterprises to pay attention to sustainable development,China promulgated the environmental protection tax law on December 25,2016,which began to implement on January 1,2018,marking the formal withdrawal of the pollutant discharge fee,which has been implemented for nearly 40 years.The environmental protection tax is an important part of China’s tax reform,which is regarded as an important forced mechanism to accelerate the green upgrading of enterprises.This paper takes the implementation of environmental protection tax in 2018 as the natural experiment,selects 1180 polluting listed companies from 2013 to 2019 as the research sample,and takes whether the tax burden has increased significantly as the grouping standard tests the impact of environmental protection tax on investment efficiency.The empirical results show:(1)The implementation of environmental protection tax can significantly improve corporate investment efficiency,and this has been achieved by inhibiting excessive investment.(2)According to the analysis of the property rights,the scale of enterprises,levels of pollution and environment supervision intensity,it is found that the conclusion was more obvious in the nonstate-owned enterprises,large-scale enterprises,heavy polluting enterprises and enterprises facing high environmental supervision intensity.Environmental protection tax is the first specially established tax to promoting environmental protection in China,which has a long-term effect on enterprise pollution control and green production.This paper provides empirical evidence for the implementation of environmental protection tax at the micro enterprise level,which is conducive to expand the relevant literature research on the issue of environmental protection fee to tax,and provides the theoretical basis and foundation for the follow-up policy implementation,which has important significance for further improving the environmental protection tax system and promoting green development.