Research On The Relationship Between Environmental Regulation And Environmental Protection Investment Of Enterprises

As the most important member of social production,enterprises have become the main consumers of energy resources and the main producers of environmental pollution problems.Under this background,the protection of the environment has increasingly become the basic and urgent demand of every member of the society.The key to environmental protection is to standardize the enterprise's pollution-emission activities and promote the enterprise's environmental protection investment behavior.As a public sector,the government has invested a lot of money to deal with environmental problems,but environmental pollution problems still occur from time to time.Obviously,the solution to environmental problems can not only rely on the government,but also enterprises.As the biggest producer of environmental problems,they should take responsibilities.The Chinese government starts from various parties and uses various means to regulate the pollution behavior of enterprises.The administrative aspects include the “Guidelines for Environmental Information Disclosure of Listed Companies”,“The Environmental Protection Law”,“Environmental Protection Tax Law” and other regulations.Market means include actively using pollution charges and tradable sewage permits to control pollution problems,and promote enterprises to increase investment in environmental protection.The “Guide” stipulate that listed companies in 16 heavy polluting industries,such as thermal power,steel and chemical industry,should publish annual environmental reports in a timely manner,and disclose annual environmental responsibility performance,such as the scale of environmental protection investment,pollutant emissions,etc.This paper uses the data of Listed Companies in heavy pollution industries to study the relationship between environmental regulation,agency conflict and the scale of corporate environmental investment.Firstly,this paper reviews the literature of domestic and foreign scholars on the relationship between environmental protection investment,environmental regulation and enterprise environmental protection investment,agency conflict and enterprise environmental protection investment.On this basis,combining externality theory,new institutionalism theory,Porter hypothesis and agency cost theory,this paper constructs the theoretical framework of the impact of environmental regulation on enterprises' environmental protection investment and how agency conflict and market competition regulate the relationship between them.Then,taking listed companies in heavy polluting industries from 2012 to 2017 as samples,this paper empirically analyses the impact of environmental regulation on the scale of environmental protection investment and the moderating effect of market competition and agency conflict on environmental regulation.At the same time,this paper compares the sensitivity of enterprises with different property rights to the intensity of environmental regulation.The results show that: Environmental regulation plays a positive role in promoting environmental protection investment of enterprises.Compared with state-owned companies,non-state-owned companies will actively cater to environmental regulation policies and they are more susceptible to the change of environmental regulation intensity.Enterprises with high product market competition have better promotion effect of environmental regulation on environmental protection investment.However,the existence of agency conflict between shareholders and managers inhibits the promotion of environmental regulation on environmental protection investment of enterprises.Finally,based on the above research,this paper puts forward corresponding suggestions and measures.The following are the possible contributions of this paper: Firstly,on the basis of the direct pressure of laws and regulations,adding normative pressure and imitative tendency,expanding the path study of environmental regulation affecting the role of environmental protection investment.Secondly,the regulatory role of market competition and agency conflict enriches the relevant literature on the relationship between environmental regulation and environmental protection investment of enterprises.This study provides a strong basis for the government to promote environmental protection governance,and provides an effective basis for enterprises to optimize the structure of environmental protection investment,and to improve corporate governance mechanism.