Wenjing Ma

Preventive environmental investment can enhance corporate environmental pollution management at the source and facilitate green transformation development. As a form of government of green investment behavior, urban greening construction exhibits a “demonstration effect” and “innovation effect” on corporate preventive environmental investment. To investigate this, the present study utilizes Chinese listed company and city-level data from 2011 to 2020 to analyze the influence, mechanism, and heterogeneity of urban greening construction on corporate environmental preventive investment. The findings indicate that urban green construction significantly encourages corporate preventive environmental investments by increasing enterprises’ willingness to participate in environmental regulation and advancing their green technology innovation. Furthermore, the environmental investment impact of urban greening construction exhibits considerable regional and corporate heterogeneity. Specifically, this effect is more pronounced in areas with lower marketability degrees and environmental regulation levels. It plays a more substantial role for state-owned enterprises and enterprises with lower agency costs.

Industrial agglomeration is a major source of regional economic development and the main pattern enterprises employ after having developed to a certain stage. Industrial agglomeration also affects the emissions of air pollutants in production. Based on provincial panel data for China from 2006 to 2019, this paper introduces the full generalized least squares (FGLS) panel econometrics model. By considering spatial correlation, the potential endogenous problem has been controlled using the instrumental variable and the effects of the co-agglomeration of manufacturing and producer services on three major air pollutants, i.e., SO₂, PM_2.5, and NO_x, have been empirically estimated. The empirical results show that: (1) The agglomeration of manufacturing increases the emission of PM_2.5 in the air, while the agglomeration of producer services and the co-agglomeration of manufacturing and producer services reduce it. Moran correlation index test showed that SO₂ and NO_x had no significant spatial correlation. (2) The agglomeration of manufacturing, the agglomeration of producer services, and co-agglomeration exert the most significant effects on PM_2.5 in the air in central and western China. This is probably because of the availability of basic natural resources in these areas. (3) The energy consumption structure mediates the effect of the agglomeration of manufacturing on PM_2.5, and human capital mediates the effect of the agglomeration of producer services on PM_2.5 emissions. Based on the results, policy suggestions to improve the atmospheric environment during the process of industrial agglomeration are proposed.