The Impact Of Environmental Regulation On Corporate Environmental Investment

The environmental pollution and ecological destruction is increasingly serious. Environmental issues gradually catch the concern of the international community. Enterprises as the largest body of social production cause more and more severe damage to ecological environment. But companies are not willing to invest in pollution control. Environmental pollution will not be resolved without government regulation.Based on the present research achievements, this paper depicts the development and the current situation of corporate environmental investment and analyzes how it is affected by environmental regulation and property rights. Based on China's listed enterprise panel data from 2010 to 2014, corporate environmental investment was categorized according industry, property right and region, in order to analyze its environmental investment behavior. According to the domestic and foreign scholars' method, environmental regulation intensity is built. Panel regression model and Grouping regression were used to verify impact of environmental regulation on corporate environmental investment.Grouping regression results show that the environmental regulation had a “Threshold Effect” on enterprise's environmental investment. When environmental regulation intensity exceeded structure change point, environmental regulation had played an important role in prompting companies increase environmental investment. At the same time, the results suggest that current environmental regulation in most provinces were below structure change point. It couldn't have the effect of prompting companies increase environmental investment. Panel regression results show that environmental regulation intensity and enterprise investment level of environmental protection had significant negative correlation relationship. At present government environmental regulation couldn't encourage companies to expand the scale of environmental investment. Factors that affect other enterprise investment had little to do with corporate in environmental investment. Heavy pollution enterprises invest more than non-heavy pollution enterprises in environmental protection.