ABSTRACT As a top honor for the overall civilization of cities in mainland China, the National Civilized City (NCC) award reflects good city reputation of the award-winners. This study investigates whether and how NCC awards affect stock price crash risk. Using a staggered difference-in-differences model, we find that the NCC award significantly reduces local firms’ future crash risk. This effect is more pronounced among firms with a better corporate reputation, inferior internal governance, and weaker external monitoring. Mechanism tests show that the NCC award reduces crash risk by mitigating management opportunism and alleviating information opacity.