ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Voluntary Environmental Regulation
and Stock Price Crash Risk: Moderating Role
of Media Attention
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School of Business, Macau University of Science and Technology, Avenida Wai Long, Taipa, Macao, China
Submission date: 2022-11-26
Final revision date: 2022-12-10
Acceptance date: 2022-12-17
Online publication date: 2023-02-07
Publication date: 2023-03-14
Corresponding author
Juntian Wang
Macau University of Science and Technology, Macau
Pol. J. Environ. Stud. 2023;32(2):1835-1847
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ABSTRACT
With the increasing attention to environmental protection, flexible voluntary environmental
regulation has aroused extensive discussion. Using the 3432 Chinese A-share listed companies as
research samples from 2008 to 2020, we explore the relationship between voluntary environmental
regulation and the risk of the stock price crash, and the moderating effect of media attention. We find
that voluntary environmental regulation can effectively reduce stock price crash risk, which supports
the Porter hypothesis. The media attention further enhances the negative relationship between voluntary
environmental regulation and stock price crash risk. We further consider the nature of corporate
property rights and find that voluntary environmental regulation can better help state-owned companies
reduce stock price crash risk, while the impact on non-state companies is not significant. In addition,
we divide the media attention into positive and negative categories, and the results show that both
positive and negative media attention positively mediate the negative relationship between voluntary
environmental regulation and stock price crash risk. Our conclusions confirm the Porter hypothesis and
provide some implications for policymakers to optimize environmental regulation.