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<p>Environmental penalties serve as crucial policy measures for reducing environmental pollution. Using the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), this study develops the Entrepreneurial Resource Constraint Mitigation (ERCM) theory to explain how environmental penalties affect entrepreneurship by alleviating financial and human resource constraints. In addition, environmental penalty indirectly promotes the growth of entrepreneurial activities by improving corporate performance, enhancing the economic agglomeration, and stimulating technological innovation and knowledge spillovers. Drawing on panel data for 282 Chinese cities from 2008 to 2020, this study adopts a two-way fixed effects (FE) approach incorporating city-specific and temporal factors. The empirical results reveal that intensified environmental penalty significantly fosters entrepreneurship at the city level. The empirical results show that stricter environmental penalties significantly promote city-level entrepreneurship, and this effect operates through both economic agglomeration and technological innovation. Robustness checks using alternative measures and instrumental variable approaches confirm these findings. Moreover, the pro-entrepreneurial impact of environmental penalty tends to be stronger in cities characterized by advanced digital technology and higher government investment in technology. These findings suggest that well-designed environmental penalties can simultaneously serve as tools for pollution control and a catalyst for entrepreneurship, yielding important policy implications for aligning environmental regulation with innovation and digital development strategies.</p>

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Environmental penalties and city entrepreneurship: evidence from China

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2025年11月26日

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  • Yulin Hu,
  • Xiaohui Chen,
  • Hongwei Zhang

摘要

Environmental penalties serve as crucial policy measures for reducing environmental pollution. Using the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), this study develops the Entrepreneurial Resource Constraint Mitigation (ERCM) theory to explain how environmental penalties affect entrepreneurship by alleviating financial and human resource constraints. In addition, environmental penalty indirectly promotes the growth of entrepreneurial activities by improving corporate performance, enhancing the economic agglomeration, and stimulating technological innovation and knowledge spillovers. Drawing on panel data for 282 Chinese cities from 2008 to 2020, this study adopts a two-way fixed effects (FE) approach incorporating city-specific and temporal factors. The empirical results reveal that intensified environmental penalty significantly fosters entrepreneurship at the city level. The empirical results show that stricter environmental penalties significantly promote city-level entrepreneurship, and this effect operates through both economic agglomeration and technological innovation. Robustness checks using alternative measures and instrumental variable approaches confirm these findings. Moreover, the pro-entrepreneurial impact of environmental penalty tends to be stronger in cities characterized by advanced digital technology and higher government investment in technology. These findings suggest that well-designed environmental penalties can simultaneously serve as tools for pollution control and a catalyst for entrepreneurship, yielding important policy implications for aligning environmental regulation with innovation and digital development strategies.