Mediating effect of corporate social responsibility-based entrepreneurship on environmental improvement: Evidence from 475 heavy-polluting enterprises

Abstract

Studies have investigated how environmental regulation increases the corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the corresponding entrepreneurship for enterprises, which conversely stimulates the adoption of more environment-friendly measures. This study investigates the mediating effect of CSR-based entrepreneurship on environmental improvement of atmospheric quality from 475 heavily polluting enterprises in Yangtze River Delta (YRD). The measured CSR-based entrepreneurship is relatively weak despite its significant increase in YRD during 2014–2019. The public regulations have positively stimulated CSR-based entrepreneurship and the non-public regulations have significantly supplemented the cultivation role of CSR-based entrepreneurship. The mediating effect of CSR-based entrepreneurship on atmospheric performances reaches 10.76%. The mediating effect due to non-public regulations increases and accounts for 11.80%, 18.40% and 23.05% of the total mediating effect, given the non-public regulation intensities of 0.32, 0.5935 and 0.788, respectively. The results confirm that raising the initiative of non-public regulations should be the priority of environmental governance.