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2249The issue of environmental governance cannot be separated from the participation of micro enterprises. One important way for enterprises to participate in environmental governance is environmental investment. Based on the dual research framework of government policy and legal environment, this paper discusses the impacts of environmental policy and environmental enforcement on regional enterprises’ environmental investment from the perspectives of environmental policy uncertainty and the establishment of environmental tribunals, respectively.
This paper finds that from the perspective of environmental policy, environmental policy uncertainty inhibits corporate environmental investment; from the perspective of environmental enforcement, environmental investment increases when environmental tribunals are set up by the intermediate people’s courts in prefecture-level cities. Meanwhile, it is found that the establishment of environmental tribunals weakens the inhibitory effect of environmental policy uncertainty on environmental investment, indicating that environmental enforcement is an effective complement to environmental policy uncertainty. Heterogeneity testing shows that the inhibitory effect is stronger in private enterprises, heavily polluting industries, and regions with stricter environmental regulations; and the promotion effect is stronger in private enterprises, non-heavily polluting industries, and regions with stricter environmental regulations. Additionally, this paper adopts research methods such as instrumental variables and DID to reduce endogeneity issues in empirical research.
The contributions of this paper are as follows: First, it innovatively synthesizes policy and law into the framework of corporate environmental investment. Government policy and legal environment are the two most important external mechanisms that constrain environmental investment behavior, and they have a synergistic effect. Second, it penetrates the research method of economic policy uncertainty to environmental policy uncertainty, and analyzes how environmental policy uncertainty affects corporate environmental investment, expanding the research perspective on corporate environmental investment. Third, it uses a textual approach to identify newspaper texts and measures the level of environmental policy uncertainty in each prefecture-level city in China, which is a useful addition to the existing research on how environmental policy changes affect corporate behavior.
