Does CEO Green Experience Influence Corporate Response to the Environmental Protection Tax? Evidence on Disclosure and Boundary Conditions

This paper examines whether CEO green experience shapes firms’ responses to China’s environmental protection tax (EPT) under the 2018 “fee-to-tax” reform. Using a panel of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2013 to 2023, we construct a firm–year measure of the effective environmental payment burden by harmonizing pollution discharge fees (pre-2018) with EPT payments (post-2018) and scaling by operating revenue. This measure is intended to capture firm-level response patterns under the EPT regime, rather than represent firms’ underlying environmental outcomes directly. CEO green experience is measured through keyword-based text analysis and manual verification of publicly available CEO résumés and coded as an indicator variable. Employing a two-way fixed effects framework with firm and year fixed effects and firm-clustered standard errors, we find that firms led by green-experienced CEOs exhibit a significantly lower effective EPT burden. Mechanism tests suggest that environmental information disclosure—proxied by the issuance of a standalone environmental report—serves as an important channel in this relationship: green-experienced CEOs are more likely to promote environmental reporting, which is associated with a lower effective tax burden. A battery of robustness checks, including alternative measures of CEO green experience and restricting the sample to the post-2018 period, supports the stability of the main results. Heterogeneity analyses further suggest that the association is stronger among highly educated CEOs, large firms, and firms in heavily polluting industries. The findings highlight the role of executive characteristics and disclosure institutions in shaping firm-level responses to market-based environmental regulation.