Using the data of Chinese listed firms from 2003-2020, this study applies a System GMM estimation approach to document that high local government ecological concerns increase a firm’s stock price crash risk. This finding remains consistent after addressing endogeneity issues and undergoing robustness checks. This study also reveals that the implementation of the new environmental protection law in 2015 mitigates the relationship between local government ecological concerns and stock price crash risk. Further analyses indicate that stricter environmental regulation and high subsidies, as well as enhanced corporate social responsibility and governance, can effectively alleviate the adverse effect of local government ecological concerns on stock price crash risk. In addition, we note that the influence of local government ecological concerns on stock price crash risk is more significant in the eastern region, heavily polluting industries, and non-SOEs. Lastly, the research identifies two potential channels through which local government ecological concerns can impact stock price crash risk by reducing the quality of information disclosure and intensifying investor disagreement.

Using the staggered opening of governmental public data platforms in China, we employ the difference-in-difference approach to investigate how public data access affects stock price synchronicity. We find that stock price synchronicity significantly drops after the public data platform is established in a firm’s headquarters city. The underlying mechanism is reducing information acquisition costs rather than increasing market attention or corporate information disclosure quality. Furthermore, the informational role of public data platforms magnifies under higher informed trade risk, poorer corporate governance, or better regional economic and innovation capacity. We highlight the role of public data in facilitating financial market efficiency.

Environmental information disclosure is an effective way for corporate to fulfill environmental protection responsibilities and encourage environmental self-inspection and management. In this paper, we utilize the environment fee to tax reform implemented in 2018 as a quasi-experiment, to investigate the impact of mandatory environmental regulation change on firm environmental information disclosure quality. Using data from listed companies in China between 2015-2020, we found that the mandatary environment regulation positively affects the monetary and non-monetary environmental information disclosure in heavy polluting industries. We also found that, firms with higher environmental subsidies and market value tend to disclose more information. The mechanism analysis shows that external governance and internal control mediate the effect of mandatory environmental regulation on environmental information disclosure quality. Compared to a growing literature on voluntary regulation, our findings provide evidence emphasizing the role of mandatory regulation of government incentives in environmental improvement.