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This study takes the central, provincial and municipal Environmental Protection Interviews (multi-hierarchical EPI) as a mechanism innovation for precise environmental regulation in Yangtze River Delta (YRD) and constructs a multi-cutoff regression discontinuity design to accurately measure the policy effects of multi-hierarchical EPI on air quality improvement in YRD. Overall, the findings demonstrate that EPI at all levels is correlated with improving the air quality for interviewed cities in the short term, which tends to weaken after 3–6 months and may even rebound to the initial level after a longer period. The improvement effect of EPI on air quality is primarily reflected in controlling the pollutant concentration of PM2.5, PM10 and NO2. Moreover, there were great differences in the policy effects of the multi-hierarchical EPI for air quality improvement amongst cities in YRD. The higher administrative level of EPI, the stronger policy effects of the corresponding EPI were. The provincial and municipal EPI are likely to involve initiative regulation and exert greater effects. Some cities under the provincial and municipal EPI could break through the hierarchical constraints and shift to stronger air quality improvement effects, providing new reference for China's precise environmental governance mechanism.

Low-carbon city pilot (LCCP) policy is a progressive pollution regulation policy. Besides its role in carbon emission reduction, it has a profound impact on green growth performance and green innovation efficiency. Based on the data of 12 pilot cities and 14 non-pilot cities in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD), this study applies the PSM-DID and spatial mediating model to investigate the multi-dimensional policy effects of LCCP policy on green growth performance and green innovation efficiency. First, the direct effect of LCCP policy on green growth performance has reached 1.46%, ever since its implementation in 2017. Second, considering the intercity innovation cooperation in YRD, LCCP policy has influenced green innovation efficiency by an increase of 12.6%. Furthermore, the time-spatial DID model and multiple mediating effect model identify that LCCP policies have significantly improved green innovation cooperation. Such policies act on the industrial structure upgrading path to achieve the ultimate objective of carbon emission reduction and green growth performance. Third, the green innovation cooperation and substantial transformation of industrial structure upgrading played an important role in realizing the LCCP policy's effect, with its mediating effect reaching 33.63%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enterprises tend to change their production and emission behaviours to foster green entrepreneurship under endogenous innovation development pressure and exogenous environmental regulation. This research innovatively establishes a theoretical framework on the dual dynamic linkage of environmental regulation and green entrepreneurship. Based on the sample data of 293 thermoelectric industry enterprises during 2017–2020, this empirical research first measures green entrepreneurship with the entropy method and finds that Zhejiang has cultivated green entrepreneurship at a primary level. Green entrepreneurship witnessed growth from 2016 to 2019. The dynamic regression identification then validates the stimulatory effect of environmental regulation on green entrepreneurship cultivation through internal competitiveness enhancement. Finally, with the application of the triple difference method (DDD), this research verifies that green entrepreneurship is positive in cultivating technological innovation and significantly facilitates environmental regulation to achieve better regulation effects through overall enterprise pollution emissions, total sulfur dioxide emissions, and total nitrogen oxide emissions. It is necessary to coordinate all aspects to cultivate green entrepreneurship and green growth in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking the environmental interventions on air quality at G20 Hangzhou Summit as a natural experiment, this paper innovatively establishes an extended synthetic control method with multiple units to evaluate the dynamic treatment effects on air quality improvement at the Summit. The method constructs data-driven weights according to the fluctuation of urban air quality to obtain a more robust and stable estimation with smaller root mean squared prediction error (RMSPE). By minimising RMSPE for pre-intervention model fitting, the study takes nine cities under policy intervention in Zhejiang as treatment cities, and 45 key cities without policy intervention as control cities during 201501–201706 as the final improved experimental scheme. The policy effect of environmental regulations on the average monthly air quality composite index of treated cities in Zhejiang is -0.84 during 201607–201702; while no significant treatment effect is observed since 201702. The results indicate that the environmental policy for the G20 Hangzhou Summit lasted a relatively short period, and it had a significant short-term improvement effect while losing its long-term improving effect on air quality in treated cities. The identification validates the extended synthetic control method with multiple units could also be applied to the policy effect evaluation in other areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper innovatively applies a spatial lagged model to investigate the consequences of the devolution of environmental regulation in the absence of knowledge-based, sustainability-oriented nested institutions. Chinese provinces are taken as self-organising social groups sharing a common resource of air quality. The spatial measurement shows that air quality has a positive spatial spillover effect on neighbouring provinces. Due to a tragedy-of-the-commons vicious cycle, however, the estimated direct, indirect and overall spatial spillover effects of the provinces' self-regulation practices on the common resource are all negative. That is, local regulations through investments for waste gas treatment exert paradoxical counter-productive effect on common resource of air quality in the local province and neighbouring provinces. These findings confirm that, in the absence of nested institutions that are based on system-level, sustainability-oriented knowledge management, even commons-protecting actions at individual provincial level may result in jeopardised common resources at the system level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]