Environmental Regulation and Corporate ESG Performance: Evidence from China's Low-Carbon City Pilot

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides evidence that policy impacts on ESG are heterogeneous, highlighting the importance of firm-level boundary conditions in causal inference.

🏢実務担当者:Suggests that firms with lower financing constraints and in less polluting sectors may benefit more from low-carbon regulations in terms of ESG improvement.

🏛政策担当者:Indicates that the design of low-carbon city pilots should consider firm characteristics to enhance policy effectiveness.

This study investigates the impact of China's Low-Carbon City Pilot (LCCP) strategy on corporate ESG performance using a sample of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2024. The analysis employs a multi-period difference-in-differences framework that exploits the staggered implementation of the policy across pilot cities. The baseline results indicate a positive but statistically insignificant average effect in the full sample, suggesting that the policy does not generate broad-based ESG improvement across firms. Further analysis shows that the policy effect is conditional rather than uniform. Positive responses are concentrated among firms with lower financing constraints in non-heavy-polluting industries, suggesting that policy effectiveness may depend on the joint configuration of firms' internal adjustment capacity and external compliance burden. Additional cohort analysis also reveals variation across implementation waves, with the 2012 cohort showing a relatively stronger response than the 2010 and 2017 cohorts. Overall, the findings suggest that the ESG consequences of low-carbon regulation in an emerging-market setting are shaped by firm-level boundary conditions and implementation context rather than by a common average response.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.54254/2754-1169/2026.gt34518first seen 2026-06-17 05:05:39 · last seen 2026-06-17 07:11:42