Can China’s leading officials’ accountability audit of natural resources policy promote corporate emissions reduction?

Abstract

The Chinese government proposed the policy of the leading officials’ accountability audit of natural resources (AANR) in 2013 and launched pilot audits in some regions in 2014. In order to explore whether AANR reduces corporate environmental pollution, this paper validates the impact of AANR on corporate emission reduction using a multi-period difference-in-difference (DID) method based on a sample of Chinese A-share heavy-polluting corporations from 2010 to 2017. The results indicated that AANR can significantly reduce corporate pollutant emissions, with legitimacy pressures and resource dependence playing a mediating role. Further research found that the AANR promoted emission reduction more strongly for large-sized corporations and political connection corporations, and more significantly for corporations with higher internal and external governance levels. Policy effects were more significant in regions with favorable economic growth and legalization. The above findings verify the effect of government audits on micro corporation pollution management, enrich the theoretical system of AANR research, and provide meaningful empirical evidence for AANR's further improvement.

Keywords:

• Leading official’s accountability audit of natural resources
• micro corporations
• emissions reduction
• government audits

Author contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Kewei Hu and Yugui Hao. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Dan Yu and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Data availability statement

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Zhejiang Provincial Social Science Planning Project "Zhejiang Province Carbon Audit System Design and Digital Collaborative Operation Mechanism Research" (Grant numbers 23NDJC199YB).