Contingent Decision of Corporate Environmental Responsibility Based on Uncertain Economic Policy

Using 522 nonfinancial listed companies on the Chinese A-share Market during 2008–2016 as the sample, this paper studies the discretion of corporations to fulfill their environmental responsibilities in the face of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) through a panel regression model and a panel quantile regression model. Additionally, the sample is classified and the heterogeneity is analyzed based on the equity nature, the financing constraints and the economic region in which the corporations are located. The conclusions are as follows. First, faced with EPU, the corporations are willing to actively undertake environmental responsibilities, but their marginal propensity to these responsibilities shows a downward trend. Second, under the premise of EPU, the decision-making behavior of different types of corporations to fulfill their environmental responsibilities is heterogeneous, which is embodied in the equity nature, financing constraints and economic region. Third, through the stepwise regression method, this paper further studies the impact mechanism, and finds that the enterprise’s leverage ratio plays a partial mediating role in the relationship between EPU and environmental responsibility of nonfinancial corporations. Our paper provides important policy implications for the government. In the process of requiring corporations to fulfill their environmental responsibilities, relevant government organizations should fully consider the impact of EPU on the corporations’ development, and the level of environmental responsibilities should be controlled based on the type of the corporation. We further suggest that the requirement should be imposed on the corporations to disclose high-quality and reliable environmental protection information. Finally, we recommend that the corporations should adhere to the route of sustainable development.