Can the government environmental audits improve corporate green investment? Evidence from China

Based on the “Opinions of the Audit Office on Strengthening the Audit of Resources and Environment” issued in 2009 as an event, we construct a quasinatural experiment to examine the impact of Chinese government environmental audits (GEAs) on corporate green investment (GI) by using the DID method. We find that government environmental audits have a significant positive impact on corporate green investment, which indicates that government environmental audits can effectively improve corporate green investment by playing a revealing, resisting, and preventing role. Furthermore, we find that executives’ environmental awareness and CEO overconfidence have a positive moderating effect, that is, they further amplify the effect of government environmental audits on green investment improvement. In addition, we find that the positive impact of government environmental audits on corporate green investment is manifested mainly in large-scale enterprises, enterprises that receive government environmental subsidy, and non-state-owned enterprises. Our conclusions confirm the microenvironmental governance effects of government environmental audits, theoretically expand research on the factors driving corporate environmental performance, and provide important practical suggestions to help pollution prevention and promote ecological civilization construction.