How Does Environmental Information Disclosure Affect Pollution Emissions: Firm-Level Evidence from China

This paper uses the environmental information announcement system as a quasi-natural experiment, cleaning China's Industrial Enterprise Pollution Database, a unique and comprehensive firm-level database, and merges it with China's Industrial Enterprise Database. Then, we use the difference-in-differences model to test the effect of environmental information announcements on firm pollution emissions and the transmission mechanism. The empirical results found that environmental information announcement has a significant environmental performance improvement effect. That is, environmental information announcements can significantly reduce pollution emissions. Moreover, the effects of environmental information announcement differ significantly under different regions, city levels, and environmental regulatory intensities. Specifically, in the eastern region, first-class cities, and regions with higher environmental regulations, the emission reduction effects of enterprises are more obvious. Further transmission mechanism test results show that environmental information disclosure has a dual emission reduction mechanism of internal driving and external pressure. Front-end of technological innovation and end-of-end environmental governance are important manifestations in internal driving. Under external pressure, companies will reduce production so as to achieve the goal of reducing pollution emissions.