The Spillover Effects of Environmental Regulations: A Perspective of Chinese Unregulated Firms' Tax Burden

Previous studies focus on the direct impacts of environmental regulations while paying less attention to spillover effects. Taking the Eleventh Five-year Plan in China as a quasi-natural experiment, our results show that environmental regulations significantly increase the tax burden of unregulated firms. Environmental regulations generate spillover effects on firms that should not be subjected to regulatory policies. Further channel analysis shows that the fiscal pressure of local governments caused by environmental regulations is a major channel for the increase in the tax burden of unregulated firms. Finally, according to the heterogeneity results, the spillover effects are more pronounced in small firms, non-state-owned enterprises, and provinces with stricter enforcement. Our findings emphasize the additional costs of environmental policies, and the government should consider these costs when formulating policies.     

投资人付费评级对发行人付费评级的双重影响

近年来,评级虚高、区分度不足、事前预警功能弱等评级行业问题备受市场关注.以2012-2019年中国公司债和企业债评级数据为样本,运用两阶段回归法,分析了投资人付费评级对发行人付费评级的双重影响.研究发现:投资人付费评级助推了发行人付费评级虚高,降低了评级市场效率;发行人付费评级的市场公信力进一步下降.建议加强评级信息公开,扩大半公共产品型投资人付费评级范围,不断提高评级市场效率与公信力.     

Building smallholder farmers' capacity to adopt climate-smart agricultural practices in flood prone areas: Lessons from Bangladesh

Currently, there is an increased interest in promoting climate-smart agricultural practices (CSAPs) around the globe, however, application of these practices may vary for different climate risk hotspots. Although, climate field schools (CFS) are conducted with the aim of empowering farmers with knowledge on the various agricultural practices, little attention has been devoted to building the capacity of smallholder farmers to facilitate adoption of appropriate CSAPs. Given the effects of climate change on agriculture, it is fundamental for agricultural sustainability to answer the question that has hardly benefited from empirical analysis in previous land use studies, which is: Do CFS build farmers' capacity to adopt CSA in flood prone areas? Cross-sectional data from 600 rural farm households in south Bangladesh is used and the recursive bivariate probit (RBP) is applied to address this knowledge gap. The results reveal that participation in CFS increases the probability of a farmer's soil salinity consciousness by 25% and eventually improves the probability to adopt climate-smart agricultural practices by 20%. We also analyzed the spillover effects of CFS participation on CSA adoption and found that there is a strong spillover effect which has important implications on the cost effectiveness and sustainability of the program. Overall, the study provides empirical evidence demonstrating that participatory approaches stimulate adoption of appropriate CSAPs by building farmers' capacity in recognizing the existing climate risk hotspots.