The Impact Of Environmental Protection Law On Enterprises' Environmental Protection Investment

Under the background of China's continuous efforts to promote ecological civilization and build a resource-conserving and environment-friendly society,the central government has accelerated the continuous improvement of the environmental policy system,but the improvement of environmental conditions has not been effective.The root cause lies in the low efficiency of local governments in the implementation of written laws.Under the relative performance evaluation standard based on GDP,competition between local governments will attract enterprises to accelerate economic development by weakening the implementation of environmental policies.However,the revised version of the environmental protection law of the People's Republic of China implemented on January 1st,2015,on the one hand,transforms the role of local governments,and on the other hand,encourages public participation,which significantly increases the promotion pressure and public pressure faced by local governments.At this time,the government must adjust the management mode,carry out effective environmental governance and supervision,and the enterprises within the jurisdiction will also adjust the nature and scale of investment.However,the adjustment of the government and enterprises must be different due to the differences in regional environmental quality.This article selects the listed companies of heavy pollution industry from 2013 to 2016 as the research object,PSM-DID estimation model was used to test the relationship between the implementation of the new environmental protection law and the environmental protection investment of enterprises in different environmental quality regions.Then,the property right nature and local environmental protection law enforcement intensity were taken as grouping variables to analyze their impact on the relationship between the two.The research results show that after the implementation of the new environmental protection law,compared with regional enterprises with better environmental quality,regional enterprises with poor environmental quality have significantly higher investment in environmental protection.Further analysis shows that non-state-owned enterprises in areas with poor environmental quality have significantly improved their investment in environmental protection after the implementation of the new environmental protection law,but have not been reflected in state-owned enterprises.Similarly,enterprises in regions with poor environmental quality and strong environmental protection law enforcement have significantly improved their investment in environmental protection after the implementation of the new environmental protection law,while enterprises in regions with weak environmental protection law enforcement have not been reflected.The innovation of this paper lies in the following aspects: first,from the perspective of environmental quality,this paper studies the relationship between macro environmental policy legislation and micro enterprise environmental protection investment,which enriches the research on the impact of environmental policy legislation on enterprise environmental protection behavior.Throughout the current research literature,the main consideration is the impact of environmental policy enforcement,such as environmental regulation,on corporate environmental investment,and this paper links environmental policy legislation with corporate environmental behavior.Second,this paper discusses the impact of the new environmental protection law on environmental protection investment of enterprises in different environmental quality regions.Because the environmental conditions and economic development levels of different regions are quite different,local governments,as the implementers and supervisors of the new Environmental Protection Law,will directly affect the governance effects of different environmental quality regions.Therefore,this paper explains the unique perspective of local government's differentiated environmental governance motives in different environmental quality regions,thus deepening the research of local governments in environmental governance.