The Impacts of Two Revisions of the China’s Environmental Protection Fee on Firm Performance: Evidence From Stock Markets

This comparative study aims to investigate how China’s environmental protection fee affected firm performance in two separate sample periods, namely 2001–2006 and 2012–2017, as this policy was revised twice in 2003 and 2014. With the Difference-in-Differences (DID) estimation, we find that the second revision of environmental protection fee had a negative impact on heavy polluting firms, while the influence of the first revision seemed to be insignificant. Moreover, the environmental protection fee had a limited impact on other firms, implying that such a policy had achieved its designed effect by precisely governing heavy polluters. Besides, our additional tests show that the environmental protection fee had stronger impacts on non-connected firms and non-SOEs than politically connected firms and SOEs. Our results are robust to various potential endogeneity issues