Low Carbon City Pilot,Public Environmental Concerns And Corporate Environmental Protection Investment

In recent decades,China’s rapid social development and repeated economic miracles have brought about a series of environmental problems,such as energy consumption and carbon emissions,which have put enormous pressure on social development and the ecological environment.In order to protect the environment and decoupling carbon emissions from economic development,many policies and measures have been put forward.In the social functioning system,the enterprise’s production activities,especially the industrial ones,have been the main part of carbon emission and environmental pollution.Against this background,can low-carbon city pilot policy motivate companies to invest more and participate in the environmental governance system? What role can public attention to the environment play in this? Based on this,this study takes corporate environmental protection investment as the object of investigation,collates the panel data of 272 listed companies in China from 2010 to2016,then uses the difference-in-difference model and classification regression method to test the impact of low-carbon city pilot policies on enterprise environmental protection investment and its transmission mechanism.Low-carbon city pilot has been piloted since 2010,and up to now,three batches of pilot policies have been carried out successively,among which the third batch of pilot cities implemented in 2017 are mostly concentrated in county-level cities.Due to the availability of data,this study only considers the first two batches of pilot cities,and the study period will end in 2016 to prevent the impact of the third batch of pilot policies.In terms of writing arrangement,the relevant theories and existing literature are first reviewed and summarized.On this basis,this paper proposes the hypothesis of the relationship between lowcarbon city pilot and corporate environmental protection investment,and then propose a hypothesis for its possible mechanism of action.Next,this paper uses the differential method to empirically test the impact of low-carbon city pilot on enterprise environmental protection investment,and tests the impact mechanism of public environmental concern.After that,this paper further tests the heterogeneity of property right nature,industry and region.After empirical study,this paper finds that:(1)low-carbon city pilot policies promote enterprises’ investment in environmental protection.This conclusion is still valid after a series of robustness tests,including parallel trend test,placebo test,changing clustering standard error and changing the period of the sample.Other possible interference factors are excluded after these robustness tests,which proves the reliability of the conclusion;(2)Low-carbon city pilot policies can promote enterprises’ environmental investment by raising the public’s environmental concern;(3)Through further heterogeneity research,it is found that the heterogeneity of property right nature,industries and regions of enterprises has a certain difference in the relationship between low carbon policy and corporate environmental protection investment.Specifically,low carbon city pilot policies have a stronger promoting effect on the environmental protection investment of state-owned enterprises and heavily polluting enterprises than non-state-owned enterprises and non-heavily polluting enterprises,corporates in central and eastern regions are more likely to invest in environmental protection under the pilot low-carbon city policy.This study enriched the research on low-carbon city pilot and corporate environmental protection investment,and provided a reference basis for evaluating the effect of pilot policies of low-carbon cities and strengthening the establishment of environmental governance system.At the same time,when studying the impact of environmental regulation of low-carbon city pilot on enterprises’ investment in environmental protection,this paper adds the perspective of public environmental concern,in order to provide reference for the construction of an environmental governance system involving the government,the public and enterprises.