How does environmental information disclosure affect economic development and haze pollution in Chinese cities? The mediating role of green technology innovation

To achieve the win-win goal of fostering economic development and inhibiting haze pollution in China, environmental information disclosure has been given more and more attention for its role of promoting green technology innovation. Utilizing a panel data of 113 prefecture and above cities from 2008 to 2018, this thesis first provides an empirical evidence for the strategic interaction of environmental information disclosure in China, verifies the coexistence of "race to the bottom" and "race to the top", and finds that the intensity of "race to the bottom" is stronger than that of "race to the top". Then, this thesis employs an empirical analysis on the mediating role of green technology innovation between environmental information disclosure and economic development and haze pollution from the perspective of static, dynamic, and even dynamic spatial perspectives. The results show that green technology innovation partly mediates the promotion effect of environmental information disclosure on economic development and the inhibition effect of environmental information disclosure on haze pollution under the static situation. In addition, green technology innovation fully mediates the promotion effect of environmental information disclosure on economic development but partly mediates the inhibition effect of environmental information disclosure on haze pollution under the dynamic situation. Furthermore, with the consideration of dynamic and spatial spillover effects of dependent variables such as economic development and haze pollution simultaneously, the mediation roles of green technology innovation between environmental information disclosure and economic development and haze pollution are both not supported, while the inhibition effect of green technology innovation on haze pollution is still established. The results not only identify the strategic interaction of environmental information disclosure and reveal the effectiveness of the mediating role of green technology innovation between environmental information disclosure and economic development and environmental pollution under the static and dynamic situations, but also provide a theoretical framework for green, sustainable, and high-quality development in China. (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.