Study On The Impact Of Environmental Administrative Punishment On Enterprise Environmental Protection Investment

Since entering the new era,high-quality development has become the main melody of our country’s economic and social development,the process of ecological civilization construction was accelerated,the state attaches more and more importance to environmental problems,and successively promulgated a series of environmental regulations to supervise and punish environmental violations.As a means of law enforcement after the event,environmental administrative penalty imposes regulatory pressure on enterprises violating environmental regulations by imposing fines,ordering them to stop production for rectification and other administrative penalties.The increased intensity of environmental regulation can ameliorate the immediate environmental pollution problem to some extent,but whether it can have a fundamental impact on the behavior and decision-making of enterprises remains to be seen.Environmental protection investment is a concrete behavior of enterprises to carry out environmental governance.It has the characteristics of long payback period and uncertain income,so enterprises usually do not make relevant investment.And whether the environmental administrative penalty can effectively solve the negative externalities of the enterprise environment and promote the enterprise environmental investment?This paper reviews the relevant literature on environmental administrative punishment,executives’ awareness of environmental protection and enterprises’ investment in environmental protection,and summarizes the main views and conclusions.Based on the externality theory,institutional theory,deterrence theory and strategic cognition theory,this paper studies the impact of environmental administrative punishment on enterprises’ environmental investment,and takes executives’ environmental cognition as an intermediate variable to analyze the impact mechanism of environmental administrative punishment on enterprises’ environmental investment,and then puts forward the research hypothesis of this paper.Then,based on the data of Chinese A-share listed enterprises in heavily polluting industries in Shanghai and Shenzhen from 2015 to 2021,A multiple regression model is constructed to empirically test the impact of environmental administrative penalties on enterprises’ environmental investment.Meanwhile,the spillover effect of environmental administrative penalties and the mediating role of executives’ environmental awareness are investigated.And further test the impact of environmental administrative penalty on the efficiency of enterprise investment in environmental protection.Through the empirical analysis,the following conclusions are drawn:(1)Environmental administrative punishment can significantly increase enterprises’ environmental investment;(2)Environmental administrative penalties have industrial spillover effect,which can significantly increase the environmental investment of other non-penalized enterprises in the same industry through deterrent effect;(3)Environmental administrative punishment can expand corporate environmental investment by improving corporate executives’ environmental awareness;This paper verifies the mechanism of "environmental administrative punishment-executives’ environmental cognition-enterprises’ environmental investment".(4)On the basis of the direct governance effect on enterprises’ environmental investment,environmental administrative punishment can have a positive impact on the efficiency of enterprises’ environmental investment in the future period of time;(5)The higher the media attention and the fiercer the market competition,the more significant the promotion effect of environmental administrative punishment on enterprises’ environmental investment.The research contributions of this paper may mainly lie in the following aspects:(1)From the perspective of post-enforcement,the regulation function of postenforcement means on enterprises’ environmental protection investment is verified,which provides a new perspective for related research.(2)Starting from the spillover effect of environmental law enforcement,this paper reveals the deterrent effect that environmental law enforcement of target enterprises can play on other unpunished enterprises,enriching relevant researches on environmental law enforcement.(3)The relationship among the three was studied for the first time,and the mechanism of "environmental administrative punishment--executives’ environmental protection cognition--enterprises’ environmental protection investment" was established to expand the research in related fields.In general,the study of this paper has certain guiding significance for the revision and improvement of environmental laws and regulations and the law enforcement focus of environmental protection departments.