Environmental degradation is causing global warming, which is of the utmost concern to both physical and social scientists. A number of potential determinants of environmental degradation are analysed in the literature. This study examines the role of government expenditure and financial development in environmental degradation in the context of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis for the Venezuelan economy. Time series data have been analysed for this purpose. The long-term relationship between the variables in this study is established through a bounds test in the presence of an unknown structural break. The results of this study confirm the EKC hypothesis. It is found that energy use is harming the quality of the environment not only in the long run but also in the short run. This study finds a positive impact of government expenditure on environmental degradation, which indicates that the Venezuelan government is not taking its expenditure for a sustainable environment into account. Moreover, this study finds that financial development is hindering environmental degradation. This means that financial institutions in Venezuela can help to develop the concept of sustainable energy in the country and the Venezuelan government can reduce carbon emissions through financial development.

The existing literature finds that mandatory environmental regulation (MER) can significantly reduce environmental pollution. However, much less is known about how the implementation of MER affects green development efficiency (GDE). Based on the Air Pollution Control Action Plan which was enforced in 2013 in China’s most developed regions as an exogenous shock, we find that first, MER has a significant negative effect on the improvement of GDE by reducing regional scale efficiency. Second, MER mainly reduces the GDE of cities with stronger regulation intensities and with larger economic volumes. Third, MER also has a negative impact on regional green total factor productivity by changing technical progress. We suggest that when implementing MER, governments should enhance regional and global cooperation, promote green technology, and use comprehensive policy tools to stimulate firms’ green innovation.

<abstract><p>Industrial pollution comes not only from within industries, but also from between industries that are strongly linked. From the perspective of agglomeration, this study explores the mutual transmission of pollution between different manufacturing industries. We found that there is an inverted U-shape relationship between inter-industry agglomeration and environmental pollution among 20 Chinese manufacturing industries. Energy intensity, which is an important transmission path from agglomeration to pollution, is positively related to the energy consumption of industries with some degree of agglomeration. Besides, the expansion of production scale caused by inter-industry agglomeration leads to more energy consumption and pollution. Furthermore, the innovative technology resulting from inter-industry agglomeration reduces environmental pollution but does not have a significant impact on energy consumption.</p> </abstract>

Because of the information asymmetry and risk uncertainty, export firms will learn to adjust export decisions from their peers. Based on the micro-matching data of China's customs export products and listed firms, this paper examines the peer effect of firms export activities by introducing equity shock as an exogenous variable. It is found that first, the values, scopes and number of destinations of exporters' products are positively influenced by their peer firms; second, exporters with lower product quality, growth capability and export intensity will follow those exporters with better export performances to change their behaviors. These asymmetric results prove that peer effect of firms' export behavior is in accordance with the law of logical imitation; third, CEOs with different demographic characteristics have great impact on the magnitude of export peer effect, showing that risk preferences and cognitive patterns of CEOs are significant for firms' export behavior.