The New Environmental Protection Law,Environmental Information Disclosure And Corporate Investment Efficiency

In the context of high-quality economic development,investment that transforms from scale to efficiency,is of great concern to all sectors of society as an important source of national economic growth and enterprise value creation.At the same time,the new Environmental Protection Law,as an important representative of commandbased and formal environmental regulation,takes institutionalization and legalization as a means to strengthen punishment and supervision,clarify responsibility and obligation,information disclosure,public participation and other multiple ways to bring unprecedented environmental managemental pressure to the enterprises,and also influence their investment decisions.High pollution and high energy consumption have always been the problems of heavily polluting enterprises in manufacturing industry,accompanied by inefficient investment behavior of blind expansion for profit at the expense of environment,which is a realistic problem to be solved.As a product of meeting the legitimacy of enterprises and establishing a good social image under the background of environmental regulation,environmental information disclosure has the effect of improving inefficient investment by alleviating information asymmetry and inhibiting opportunistic behavior.Whether heavily polluting manufacturing enterprises can reasonably cope with the increasingly stringent environmental regulations and maximize the value of their investment while meeting the requirements of environmental management is an important reflection of the harmonization of economy and environmental protection.Therefore,it is important to explore whether the new Environmental Protection Law can have a positive impact on investment efficiency,and play an intermediary role through environmental information disclosure,which is important to achieve the dual role of pollution control and efficiency improvement.This paper focuses on formal environmental regulation and assesses the practical effects of the implementation of the new Environmental Protection Law.Based on information asymmetry theory,principal-agent theory,externality theory,and organizational legitimacy theory,this paper selects data of A-share manufacturing listed companies from 2012-2021 to explore the correlation between the new Environmental Protection Law and investment efficiency of heavily polluting enterprises in manufacturing industry,the mediating effect of environmental information disclosure and the moderating effect of public environmental concern through two-way fixed difference-in-difference model,two-step method and Bootstrap method of mediating effect model and moderating effect model,respectively.In addition,the heterogeneity of property rights nature in the policy effects of the new Environmental Protection Law is considered.Based on the results of the empirical analysis,the following conclusions are drawn:(1)The new Environmental Protection Law helps to improve the investment efficiency of heavily pollution manufacturing enterprises by alleviating underinvestment and curbing over-investment.However,the promotion effect has a volatility of first strengthening and then weakening,and the continuity is insufficient.(2)Environmental information disclosure plays a complementary mediating role,and the new Environmental Protection Law improves the under-investment of heavily pollution manufacturing enterprises through the channel of environmental information disclosure.(3)Public environmental concerns play a moderating role,positively moderating the promotion role of the new Environmental Protection Law in the overinvestment of heavily pollution manufacturing enterprises.(4)The new Environmental Protection Law has obvious heterogeneity of property rights.Among the heavily pollution manufacturing enterprises,state-owned enterprises are more significantly promoted by the new Environmental Protection Law on investment efficiency,while non-state-owned enterprises are not.Therefore,suggestions are made for the improvement of investment efficiency in terms of government level,playing the role of government guidance mechanism;improving the environmental information disclosure mechanism and playing the synergistic role of public participation;and in terms of enterprise level,establishing the concept of corporate sustainable development;and improving the quality of environmental information disclosure.