The impact of political connections on firm pollution: New evidence based on heterogeneous environmental regulation

Increasing attention has been focused on the extent to which corporate political connections influence the growing pollution due to the rapid growth in the popularity of firm pollution in developing countries.We adopt a static threshold regression model to investigate the effects of heterogeneous environmental regulation on political connections and firm pollution based on the panel data from China’s A-share listed companies from 2012 to 2019.The empirical results show a non-linear relationship between the degree of political connection of listed company executives and the level of firm pollution.And the relationship between the two roughly presents a U-shaped relationship under the action of the marketincentive environmental regulation threshold.However,it roughly presents an inverted N-shaped relationship under the action of the command-control environmental regulation threshold.Additionally,the group test results show that the existence of regional and ownership heterogeneity causes certain differences in the environmental behaviour of politically connected enterprises.These findings indicate that diverse environmental regulations are needed to promote sustainable green development and to further expand the theoretical and practical exploration of political connections on firm pollution.

Risk measurement of international oil and gas projects based on the Value at Risk method

International oil and gas projects feature high capital-intensity, high risks and contract diversity. Therefore, in order to help decision makers make more reasonable decisions under uncertainty, it is necessary to measure the risks of international oil and gas projects. For this purpose, this paper constructs a probabilistic model that is based on the traditional economic evaluation model, and introduces value at risk(VaR) which is a valuable risk measure tool in finance, and applies Va R to measure the risks of royalty contracts, production share contracts and service contracts of an international oil and gas project. Besides, this paper compares the influences of different risk factors on the net present value(NPV) of the project by using the simulation results. The results indicate:(1) risks have great impacts on the project's NPV, therefore, if risks are overlooked, the decision may be wrong.(2) A simulation method is applied to simulate the stochastic distribution of risk factors in the probabilistic model. Therefore, the probability is related to the project's NPV, overcoming the inherent limitation of the traditional economic evaluation method.(3) VaR is a straightforward risk measure tool, and can be applied to evaluate the risks of international oil and gas projects. It is helpful for decision making.