命令型环境规制与重污染企业投资:激励还是抑制?——基于新《环保法》的准自然实验

Command-based Environmental Regulation and Heavy Polluters'Investment:Incentive or Disincentive?--A Quasi-Natural Experiment Based on the New Environmental Protection Law

近年来,中国政府正采取日趋严格的命令型环境规制政策试图解决环境污染问题,但微观层面的经济主体对此如何响应?本文以新《环保法》为准自然实验,基于2010—2018年A股上市企业微观数据,运用双重差分模型(DID)考察命令型环境规制对企业投资行为的影响。实证结果显示:(1)新《环保法》的实施抑制了重污染企业的投资规模,其中,企业履行社会责任起到了部分中介作用。(2)进一步研究发现,对于国有企业、高研发强度和处于激烈市场竞争环境中的企业,新《环保法》对企业投资的抑制效果更为明显。因此,政府要进一步强化针对性的激励政策协同,为异质性重污染企业提供更公平的市场环境,进而引导企业积极履行社会责任,克服企业因经济动力不足造成对投资的抑制效应。本文不仅丰富了新《环保法》与企业投资之间的关系和机制研究,更为完善环境立法体系建设提供了政策建议。

In recent years,the Chinese government has been adopting increasingly strict command-based environ-mental regulation to solve the problem of environmental pollution,but how do the micro-level economic entities re-spond to this?This paper takes the implementation of the New Environmental Protection Law as a natural experiment,based on the micro data of A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2018,and uses the Difference-in-Difference(DID)to investigate the impact of command-based environmental regulations on the corporate investment behavior.The empir-ical result shows that:(1)the implementation of the new Environmental Protection Law has inhibited the investment scale of heavily polluting enterprises,in which the social responsibility of enterprises partly plays an intermediary role;(2)further research finds that the inhibitory effect of the new Environmental Protection Law is more obvious in state-owned enterprises and in the sample environment of high R&D intensity and fierce market competition.There-fore,the government should further strengthen the coordination of targeted incentive policies to provide a fairer market environment for heterogeneous and heavily polluting enterprises,so as to guide companies to actively fulfill their so-cial responsibilities and overcome the inhibitory effect on investment caused by insufficient economic power.This paper not only enriches the research on the relationship and mechanism between the new Environmental Protection Law and corporate investment,but also provides policy suggestions for improving the construction of the environmental legisla-tion system.