Since the 18 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China,the construction of ecological civilization has been placed at a prominent position in the overall work of the Party and the country.A series of fundamental reform measures have been implemented,resulting in fruitful achievements in ecological civilization construction.As an important component of this construction,the reform of hard constraints on environmental performance of officials from the perspective of their political achievements deserves attention for its policy effects.With the improvement of China’s environmental quality and the global climate change,greenhouse gas emissions reduction has become a new issue in ecological civilization construction.In the process of implementing the "dual carbon" strategy,China is also facing new challenges.This paper retrospectively examines the policy effects of the reform of hard constraints on the environmental performance of officials in 2013,clarifies the relationship among the promotion incentives of officials,environmental regulations,and micro-tax burdens of enterprises,and provides experience and reference for coping with the implementation of the "dual carbon" strategy,making it of both theoretical and practical significance.This paper employs empirical analysis methods such as the difference-in-differences approach,using data from A-share listed companies in the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets from 2009 to 2017.The study examines the impact of the external event of the December 2013 issuance of the "Notice on Improving the Performance Evaluation of Local Party and Government Leading Bodies and Leading Cadres" by the Central Organization Department of the Communist Party of China on the micro-tax burden of heavily polluting enterprises.The empirical results show that this reform has a significant positive impact on the comprehensive tax burden,turnover tax burden,and income tax burden of heavily polluting enterprises.These results have passed a series of robustness tests,including parallel trend tests and placebo tests,demonstrating strong robustness.Mechanism analysis shows that the tax increase effect of this reform on heavily polluting enterprises is mainly achieved through reducing fixed asset investment and restricting debt financing activities of heavily polluting enterprises.Further analysis reveals that the impact of this reform on the tax increase effect of heavily polluting enterprises exhibits significant property heterogeneity and scale heterogeneity.Specifically,this reform has a more pronounced impact on state-owned enterprises,especially local state-owned enterprises,with no significant impact on private enterprises.This reform has a more pronounced impact on large-scale enterprises,with no significant impact on small and medium-sized enterprises.Based on theoretical and empirical analysis results,this paper proposes the following recommendations: First,local governments should fully leverage the positive incentive role of tax preferential policies in the environmental protection field.Second,heavily polluting enterprises should actively achieve green transformation to avoid the tax burden caused by environmental regulations.Third,local governments should fully utilize emerging technologies such as big data to avoid the heterogeneity of environmental regulation intensity caused by property heterogeneity and scale heterogeneity among enterprises,thereby avoiding resource mismatch and social welfare loss.Fourth,the Central Organization Department of the Communist Party of China should establish a response and correction mechanism for the campaign-style governance model,enhance mid-term supervision and control,and establish a postmortem accountability mechanism to further constrain radical environmental regulation behaviors of local officials.This paper deepens the research on the interaction between officials and micro-market entities and provides a theoretical basis for the organization department to further improve the performance evaluation system for officials. |