Is more always better? How government ecological attention influences corporate environmental responsibility: Empirical evidence from Chinese listed companies

Under the concept of sustainability, government attention has become a topical subject of discussion in the environmental management. The text mining techniques in this study are employed to quantify government ecological attention (GEA). Combining with the work reports of Chinese local government in 169 cities and taking the data of Chinese listed companies from 2011 to 2019 as samples, this study adopted text mining method to measure the degree of GEA and empirically analyse its influence on the corporate environmental responsibility (CER). The conclusions suggest that, first, the intensity of GEA is inconsistent between regions, showing significant phase variations. Second, there is an inverted U-shaped relation with GEA and CER, and this conclusion remains plausible after the UTEST test, endogeneity test, and other robustness test. The effects of GEA are more evident in larger firms, heavy polluting industry and Midwest region. Third, urban green innovation and government environmental support significantly weaken the inverted U-shaped relationship. This study highlights the research on government attention in the area of ecological governance, enriches the research content of environmental regulatory theory, and provides a reference for how to promote CER.