Environmental governance and firm's environmental investment: Evidence from the natural resources and assets accountability audit of outgoing officials

This paper examines how the natural resources and assets accountability audit conducted on outgoing officials affects environmental investments of Chinese listed firms. Using a longitudinal dataset and employing a staggered difference-in-differences (DD) estimation method, our findings reveal a notable increase in firms’ environmental investment due to the policy. The impact is noticeable solely within large-scale corporations and state-owned enterprises. Moreover, we further investigate the underlying mechanism and discover that the observed effects are driven by a reduction in the tax burden.