| Along with the constantly rapid economic development,there comes much environmental pollution,which is severely influencing public health and life quality.The path that China chooses to develop economy despite the huge cost of environmental damage has caused severe environmental pollution and bad air condition for all Chinese all around the country,and one-fifth of total death in China is caused by environmental pollution.The central government is aware of the importance of environmental protection,and actively guides local officials to protect the environment through adjusting cadre evaluation rules and increasing the weights of environmental protection.However,contrary to the various rules and regulations concerning the environment,the air pollution and water pollution problems around the public are not significantly improved.In the environmental governance systems of China,local governments are responsible for the enforcement of policies,and take actions to deal with environmental pollution.The key to solve the pollution problem in China is to effectively improve local cadres’ motivation to protect the environment.However,the formal promotion rules and cadre evaluation systems haven’t been able to improve local cadres’ motivation to protect the environment,and thus weakened the long-term environmental-improving effect.The adjustments of cadre evaluation rules will lead to opportunistic behaviors in pollution treatment.Since the local officials have to rapidly demonstrate their performance in environmental protection during their tenure,they will be more willingly to adopt the measures which will lead to a significant reduction in environmental pollution,such as temporarily shutting down some polluting firms,or even tampering the environmental quality data.The formal rules only take a oneside view and can not connect local officials’ motivation to public interests.The local officials will take minimum effort to shortly improve the environmental quality and meet the targets of central government.They lack the motivation to take long-term measures to deal with the environmental pollution,and therefore,the effect of pollution treatment is limited.The existed literature focuses mostly on the effect of formal rules on local officials’ environmental motivation and regional environmental quality.But the effect of these rules is limited to a very short period of time and limited to specific environmental indexes listed in the formal rules.This paper proposes the environmental governance effect of local officials’ hometown favoritism based on the cultural identity theory.Because of the hometown ties,local officials will prefer their hometown and thus take more actions to improve the life quality and living condition in their hometown.This paper explores whether local officials with hometown ties will prefer their hometown and take more actions when they are dealing with pollution problems.Specifically,when a hometown official is faced with a double-targeted evaluation of environmental governance and economic growth,will they consider more about environmental protection in their hometown than other regions?There are many factors that can hugely damage the environment,but the firms,especially heavy polluting firms are playing an indispensable role in this process.As a policy-maker and regulator of environmental protection and pollution treatment,local governments should put much environmental pressure on the heavy polluting firms within their districts,and urge them to invest in environmental protection and sustainable development.This paper takes advantage of the shocks that some cadres come back to their hometown city to be the leading officials,and thus investigate the environmental governance effect of informal rules,namely the hometown tie,through its connection to local public interests,in this setting.Based on the environmental protection data from governmental budgetary accounting and the accounting items in corporate annual reports,this paper studies the environmental governance effect of local officials’ hometown favoritism.The research framework extends from normative to empirical research paradigm.The first chapter introduces the research question and research methods,and the second chapter reviews the related literature on environmental governance as well as hometown favoritism.In concluding the weak point of existed research,the research question comes out.After that,this paper makes some theoretical analysis on the environmental governance effect of local officials’ hometown ties from the perspective of local government behaviors and firm activities.Chapter three to five are the empirical parts of this paper.Chapter three discusses the influence of local officials’ hometown favoritism on fiscal environmental expenditures,and explores the vital function of public environmental awareness.The results show that local officials’ hometown favoritism can lead to a significant increase in fiscal environmental expenditures and higher public environmental awareness leads to stronger governance effect.Furtherly,the fourth chapter analyzes the effect of hometown favoritism on corporate environmental investments of heavily polluting firms within the districts,and finds a significant governance effect.What’s more,when the fiscal pressure is higher,the local officials will rely more on firms to invest in environmental protection.And state-owned enterprises cooperate more than non-state-owned enterprises in the process of environmental protection.The fifth chapter discusses the functional mechanism behind the environmental governance effect of local officials’ hometown favoritism,and the ultimate improvement of environmental quality brought by the increase in environmental investments.Besides the main analysis,this paper also adopts numerous robustness check approaches.Firstly,to testify the parallel trend hypothesis.Since this paper applies staggered Difference-in-differences method to do the analysis,the same trend hypothesis of treatment group as well as control group must be satisfied.Secondly,we do several tests to check the exogeneity nature of cadres coming back to their hometown as leaders.This paper excludes the alternative hypothesis that cities which are heavily polluted are more possible to get cadres coming back to their hometown as leaders.And this paper also excludes the influence of politician turnover,reform of formal evaluation rules.Thirdly,this paper does the Propensity-score matching,Bootstrap method and change the control group of DID or the regression model to furtherly ensure the robustness of results.This paper may have the following contributions: Firstly,it complements a vital emotional factor into the individual utility function of Chinese politicians,and illustrates the possible mechanism behind the environmental governance effect of cadres coming back to their hometown as leaders.Secondly,this paper exemplifies the conditions on which the hometown ties of politicians can transform into regional environmental protection measures for the first time.Namely,the cadres coming back to their hometown must have power and local public must have strong appeal for environmental protection and pollution treatment.Thirdly,this paper provides a direction for police-making.Namely,the key to solve the environmental problems in China lies in that central governments make proper policies to sufficiently promote local cadres’ incentives for environmental governance.this paper finds that the hometown ties improve local cadres’ environmental incentives and the cadres thus adopts several efficient measures to improve environmental quality in the long run.As a whole,this paper reveals the long-term environmental governance effect of informal rules,namely the hometown tie,and provides policy advice for the related regulatory departments: Connecting the cadre’s motivation to public interests and appeals helps to provide long-term positive forces for the environmental governance.the central government introduces efficient policies and regulations,and promotes local cadres’ incentives for environmental protection.Local cadres adopt several measures to improve the environment within their districts and put much pressure on the heavily polluting firms.The polluting firms have no choice but to cooperate and invest in environmental protection,in exchange for future resources and possible preferrable policies instead.This paper provides empirical evidence in environmental governance for the new kind of relationship between governments and firms.Based on China background and setting,the conclusions are also helpful for all the developing countries who are stubbed in the balance between developing economy and environmental protection.In that sense,the research on this question can be of great use to the understanding of China for the whole world. |
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