CEO Political Connection and Corporate Environmental Violations: Evidence from Chinese-Listed Firms

Abstract

This paper investigates whether and how CEO political connection affects corporate environmental violations in Chinese-listed firms. Using manually collected data on CEO political connections, we find a negative association between CEO political connection and corporate environmental violations. Moreover, we show that this negative association is more pronounced in state-owned enterprises (SOEs), when environmental enforcement intensity is high and market competition is high. Our findings are robust to different econometric techniques.

Keywords: CEO political connection, environmental violations, state-owned enterprises, Market competition, environmental enforcement intensity