Study On The Impact Of Environmental Protection Fee To Tax Policy On Enterprise Earnings Management

In order to get rid of the constraints of the traditional economic growth model,the Chinese government has increasingly attached importance to the construction of ecological civilization,and the environmental regulation system is constantly improving.It is a major way for our government to regulate and control its environmental behavior by levying environmental protection taxes on relevant pollution actors,and the environmental and economic consequences of the environmental tax system have always been concerned by the academic circles.In 2018,the environmental protection tax law of the People’s Republic of China was officially implemented.Since then,the sewage charge system has officially withdrawn from the historical stage.This institutional change has endowed enterprises with more environmental responsibilities and higher environmental costs,which is bound to have an impact on their behavioral decisions.Then,under the influence of the policy of changing environmental protection fee to tax,whether the enterprise management will pass on "good" news to the outside world through the implementation of earnings management behavior is worth more in-depth discussion.Based on this background,this paper explores the impact of the implementation of the environmental protection fee to tax policy on enterprise earnings management and the mechanism between them,so as to provide empirical evidence for objectively evaluating the microeconomic consequences of the environmental protection fee to tax policy and further promoting the reform of the environmental protection tax system.This paper combs the relevant literature at home and abroad.Starting from the political cost hypothesis,externality theory,principal-agent theory and prospect theory,using the listed companies classified by B,C and D industries of Shanghai and Shenzhen A shares from 2015 to 2020 as the initial research samples,this paper empirically analyzes the impact of the policy of changing environmental protection fees to taxes on corporate earnings management by constructing a double differential model.The results show that:(1)The policy of changing environmental protection fee to tax has a significant positive impact on the accrued earnings management and real earnings management of enterprises.(2)The higher the financing constraint and the lower the analysts’ attention,the more significant the positive effect of changing environmental protection fee to tax on corporate earnings management.(3)Further research shows that the policy of changing environmental protection fee to tax has an impact on enterprise earnings management mainly through increasing the pressure of production cost and the pressure of environmental responsibility;combined with the nature of enterprise property rights,it is found that the impact of the policy of changing environmental protection fee to tax on enterprise earnings management is different,compared with state-owned enterprises,the policy has a more significant positive effect on accruals and real earnings management of non-state-owned enterprises;after distinguishing the direction of earnings management,it is found that the policy promotes enterprises to implement upward earnings management.The above conclusions are still valid after parallel trend test,placebo test,tendency score matching and other robustness tests.Finally,combined with the main research results,this paper puts forward relevant suggestions from the aspects of government policy-making,corporate governance and investor information access.