The effect of environmental regulation on firm productivity: evidence from pulp and paper industry in China

The relationship between environmental regulation and firm productivity has been widely debated but inconsistencies in findings across different studies. Using detailed firm-level micro-data from 2000 to 2007, this paper employs difference-in-difference combined with matching based on entropy balancing method to explore the effect of environmental regulation on firm total factor productivity (TFP) in pulp and paper industry in China. Our main findings are as following: Firstly, stricter environmental regulation, as represented by the Wastewater Discharge Standards for Pulp and Paper Industry in Shandong province, increases firm TFP significantly. Moreover, the coefficients of interest are robust to multiple robustness checks. Secondly, dynamic effects estimates reveal that when faced with this phase-in environmental regulation, firms take the foreseeably increasing strictness into account from the very beginning and prefer to take one-step adjustment to reach full compliance. Thirdly, potential mechanism analysis finds that the positive effect mainly comes from the improvement of resource allocation efficiency within firms. Fourthly, the heterogeneity test indicates that the effect of environmental regulation on firm TFP is heterogeneous across firms with different sizes, ages, ownerships, capital intensity, and export status. Finally, this paper provides convincing and insightful evidence that environmental regulation has the potential to achieve the dual goals of environmental sustainability and economic growth and is thus of broader significance for understanding the enforcement of environmental regulation in developing countries.