How does the new environmental protection law affect the environmental social responsibility of enterprises in Chinese heavily polluting industries?

Abstract

In the new era of seeking for cleaner production and comfortable life, it is important and necessary to improve environmental social responsibility, especially for the heavily polluting industries. Against this backdrop, the Chinese government put forward the new environmental protection law in 2015, while the effect of it on the environmental social responsibility still remains as a black box, which forms the initial motivation of this essay. Treating the implementation of the new environmental protection law (NEPL) as a quasi-natural experiment, this essay employed the difference-in-differences model to explore its impact on the environmental social responsibility (ESR) of highly polluting enterprises. The results support that implementing the NEPL can enhance the level of environmental social responsibility by strengthening the end-of-pipe governance and green office level of enterprises, in contrast, the affection on the front-end governance is not significant. The results remain unchanged after various robustness tests, such as changing the time point of the policy, placebo test, and elimination of sample selection bias. Further research finds that the scale of corporate financing and the efficiency of capital use have different moderating effects on the effectiveness of the implementation of the NEPL policy. Mechanism analysis shows that the NEPL policy affects the level of corporate environmental social responsibility through the technological innovation crowding-out effect. In addition, heterogeneity analysis reveals that environmental regulation intensity has an “inverted U-shaped” effect on the ESR of businesses. Furthermore, non-state-owned companies and companies with higher levels of executive education have higher levels of environmental social responsibility. Finally, policy implications are provided to shed light on this essay’s theoretical and practical values.