Urban Rivers and Corporate Environmental Performance: Evidence from Listed Companies in China

Civilization begins with rivers, and so does pollution. Examining and deciphering the possible ecological curse effect of abundant river resources has a profound impact on sustainable economic development. This paper empirically examines the impact of urban rivers on the environmental performance of listed companies by constructing indicators of urban river length and density and measuring river resources in prefecture-level cities with a sample of listed companies in China from 2011 to 2022. It is found that the richer the urban rivers are, the lower the environmental performance of listed companies in the region, and the conclusion still holds after the robustness and endogeneity tests, proving that rivers as important natural resources also have the ecological curse effect. Further mechanism analysis reveals that urban river resources will reduce the production cost of enterprises and generate path dependence, which will have a crowding-out effect on the green innovation of enterprises; at the same time, abundant river resources will induce market failure, and institutional weakness accelerates the polluting behavior of enterprises. The research in this paper enriches the micro impacts and mechanisms of the ecological curse and provides useful references for river pollution management.