Public Environmental Attention and Corporate Greenwashing in China

Qizhi He, Maotao Liu, Xubing Fang and Najaf Iqbal

Politická ekonomie, vol. preprint

Abstract: Corporate greenwashing is increasingly posing a severe threat to the effective implementation and evaluation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Apart from the regulatory pressure, the active participation of the public in environmental governance is essential in this regard. Through a theoretical and empirical lens, this study systematically examines the impact of public environmental attention (PEA) on corporate greenwashing and its underlying mechanism in the Chinese context. The data from A-share firms and the Baidu search index for prefecture-level cities are gathered from 2011 to 2020 and analyzed using 2SLS and various robustness tests. Results show that PEA can significantly suppress corporate greenwashing. The effect is more significant in high-polluting industries, regions with better rule of law, firms with non-political connections, and older executives with environmental backgrounds. Further analysis shows that PEA reduces greenwashing by inhibiting management's shortsighted behavior and increasing analysts' attention. Expanding the government's ecological concerns and strengthening environmental regulations enhance the inhibiting effect of PEA on greenwashing. The findings remain robust after a series of robustness and endogenous tests.

Keywords: Public environmental attention; corporate greenwashing; management myopia; government environmental regulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://polek.vse.cz/doi/10.18267/j.polek.1519.html (text/html)
free of charge

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:prg:jnlpol:v:preprint:id:1519

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
Redakce Politické ekonomie, Vysoká škola ekonomická, nám. W. Churchilla 4, 130 67 Praha 3
http://polek.vse.cz

DOI: 10.18267/j.polek.1519

Access Statistics for this article

Politická ekonomie is currently edited by Jiřina Bulisová

More articles in Politická ekonomie from Prague University of Economics and Business Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Stanislav Vojir ().