Does Rent-Seeking Affect Environmental Regulation? Evidence From the Survey Data of Private Enterprises in China

Resource utilization not only meets the needs of economic development but also has a far-reaching negative impact on the environment. Environmental regulation is regarded as the key measure to solve environmental pollution. However, the rent-seeking behavior of local enterprises will seriously weaken the implementation effect of environmental regulations. Under the background of the development of big data era, the massive micro enterprise data provided by China's private enterprise survey database provides favorable conditions for this paper to study its impact effect from the direction of big data. This paper uses OLS model and Tobit model to investigate the impact of rent-seeking on the implementation effect of environmental regulation. The results show that environmental regulation will make honest enterprises actively reduce output to control the emission level. However, rent-seeking enterprises will further expand their output to gain greater profits because they are sheltered by local governments.