Firm misbehavior is cancerous to the sound development of economy and society. Therefore, it is very essential to explore the antecedents and occurrence mechanisms of firm misbehavior to effectively prevent it. Existing researches mostly focus on the individual-level and contextual-level antecedents, yet ignoring the system-level antecedents which are more important. Based on institutional anomie theory, this paper mainly explores the impact of one kind of social institution, policy and legal environment, which is an important component of the system, on firm misbehavior using panel data from 152 economies during the period of 2009 and 2015. Besides, if explores the moderating roles of education, which is another kind of social institution. The main empirical results are as follows. Firstly, while cronyism is significantly and positively related to firm misbehavior, transparency of government decision-making, efficiency of the legal framework in settling disputes and reliability of police services all display significantly negative relationships with firm misbehavior. Secondly, education quality not only directly inhibits firm misbehavior, but also positively moderates the negative relationship between reliability of police service and firm misbehavior. This paper takes the lead in China to use cross-national panel data to explore the institutional antecedents of firm misbehavior. The institutional anomie theory it introduces has broad space for application in explaining the impact of institutions and culture on firm misbehavior. Our research conclusions have important practical implications for the governance of firm misbehavior.