Local Government Tax Competition, Environmental Regulation and Enterprise Environmental Investment

Abstract

在中国经济高速发展的历程中，地方政府竞争对环境污染的影响日渐凸显，这为研究中国特色自主创新道路下的环境治理问题提供了崭新而重要的视角。本文以我国2011~2018年上市公司为样本，采用手工搜集的企业环保投入数据，探讨其对企业环保投资的影响以及作用机理。实证结果显示，地方政府竞争对企业环保投入有抑制作用，环境规制在二者关系中起到部分遮掩效应，且该作用兼具时滞效应与当期效应。进一步研究发现，不同性质的企业在环保投入方面存在差异。上述结果在考虑内生性问题以及稳健性检验后依然成立，为地方政府抑制企业环保投入提供了实证依据，也对环境规制的治理机制具有重要启示。In the course of China’s rapid economic development, the impact of local government competition on environmental pollution has become increasingly prominent, which provides a new and im-portant perspective for the study of environmental governance under the path of independent in-novation with Chinese characteristics. Taking listed companies in China from 2011 to 2018 as samples, this paper uses hand-collected data on corporate environmental investment to explore its impact on corporate environmental investment and its mechanism of action. The empirical results show that local government competition has an inhibiting effect on enterprise environmental protection investment, and environmental regulation has a partially masking effect on the rela-tionship between the two, and this effect has both time delay effect and current effect. Further re-search shows that there are differences in environmental protection investment among different enterprises. The above results are still valid after considering endogenesis and robustness test, which provides an empirical basis for local governments to restrain enterprise investment in en-vironmental protection, and also has important implications for the governance mechanism of en-vironmental regulation.