Do specialized courts matter? Environmental judiciary and corporate emissions in China

IF 9.2 2区经济学 Q1 ECONOMICS Energy Policy Pub Date : 2025-02-12 DOI:10.1016/j.enpol.2025.114532

Lisha Wang , Minjie Pan , Xinlei Qian , Kangjuan Lv

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Abstract

Strengthening the legal system is an effective guarantee for realizing ecological civilization. The establishment of environmental courts aims to enhance environmental judicial efficiency, thereby promoting low-carbon transformation. With aggregate firm-level data from the Annual Survey of Industrial Firms data set and Environmental Statistics Reporting database from 2005 to 2013, this paper employs a staggered difference-in-differences approach to investigate the pollution reduction impact of environmental court. We find that environmental courts play a significant role in facilitating the reduction of corporate pollution emissions. This study reveals that the strengthening of environmental judiciary exerts its influence through three primary channels: intensifying environmental administrative law enforcement, promoting corporate innovation, and increasing governmental environmental attention. Furthermore, the emission reduction effect of environmental courts is more significant in cities with higher environmental information transparency, non-key environmental protection cities, and labor-intensive enterprises. In addition, the effect of environmental judiciary may spill over to nearby non-environmental courts cities due to spatial policy diffusion. This paper supports the strategy of orderly advancing the construction of a beautiful China through strengthening environmental legislation and judicial measures.

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专门法庭重要吗？中国的环境司法和企业排放

加强法制建设是实现生态文明的有效保障。设立环境法院，旨在提高环境司法效率，促进低碳转型。本文利用2005 - 2013年《工业企业年度调查》数据集和《环境统计报告》数据库中的企业层面数据，采用差中差的交错差分方法研究环境法院的污染减排效果。我们发现，环境法院在促进减少企业污染排放方面发挥了重要作用。研究发现，加强环境司法主要通过加强环境行政执法、促进企业创新和提高政府对环境的重视三个渠道发挥作用。此外，环境法院的减排效果在环境信息透明度较高的城市、非重点环保城市和劳动密集型企业中更为显著。此外，由于空间政策的扩散，环境司法的效果可能会溢出到附近的非环境法院城市。本文通过加强环境立法和司法措施，支持有序推进美丽中国建设的战略。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Energy Policy 管理科学-环境科学

CiteScore

17.30

自引率

5.60%

发文量

540

审稿时长

7.9 months

期刊介绍： Energy policy is the manner in which a given entity (often governmental) has decided to address issues of energy development including energy conversion, distribution and use as well as reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in order to contribute to climate change mitigation. The attributes of energy policy may include legislation, international treaties, incentives to investment, guidelines for energy conservation, taxation and other public policy techniques. Energy policy is closely related to climate change policy because totalled worldwide the energy sector emits more greenhouse gas than other sectors.