Do Environmental Information DisclosureDiscourage Foreign Direct Investment?Empirical from China

As a cutting-edge topic within the realm of international investment, deciphering the influence of informational factors on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is of paramount importance.Due to the difficulty of capturing, identifying, and endogenizing, the "information" factor makes it particularly difficult to draw causal inferences between them.However, the environmental information disclosure policy enacted by China in 2007 has presented a unique opportunity and a natural exogenous variable for examining the influence of local environmental information announcements on the inflow of FDI.This study selects the panel data of prefecture-level cities in China from 2004 to 2021 and, constructs a quasi-natural experiment with the environmental information disclosure approach introduced in 2007.Those cities that disclose environmental information are referred to as the treatment group, while those that do not disclose such information are referred to as the control group.Using propensity score matching (PSM) to match the sample cities and exclude those with large differences, and then choosing difference-in-differences (DID) analysis to explore the net effect of environmental information disclosure on regional FDI.The findings indicate that environmental information disclosure significantly decreases regional FDI inflows, and the policy is not effective until a significant amount of time has passed.The estimation results of the balance trend test, replace the matching method test and, the counterfactual test, and the exclusion of similar policy shocks and verifies the robustness of the empirical findings.In further analysis, it is revealed that environmental information disclosure impacts FDI differently depending on city geographic location, city tiers, and environmental regulation intensity.