Journal of Cleaner Production 379 (2022) 134640

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Journal of Cleaner Production

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jclepro

Dose environmental information disclosure raise public environmental

concern? Generalized propensity score evidence from China
Dan Pan a, Wencheng Fan a, Fanbin Kong b, c, d, *
a
School of Economics, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics, China
b
Institute of Ecological Civilization & Institute of Carbon Neutrality, Zhejiang A&F University, China
c
Research Academy for Rural Revitalization of Zhejiang Province, Zhejiang A&F University, China
d
School of Economics and Management, Zhejiang A&F University, China

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Handling Editor: Zhifu Mi This paper assesses the impact of environmental information disclosure on public environmental concern based
on data from China General Social Survey 2013 (CGSS2013) and the matched socio-economic indicators and
Keywords: environmental information disclosure data at the city level. Applying a generalized propensity score (GPS)
Environmental information disclosure method, we find that the relationship between environmental information disclosure and environmental concern
Public environmental concern
is an inverted U-shaped relationship. Environmental information disclosure appears to have its highest impact on
Environmental risk perception
public environmental concern when its intensity is between 65 and 70. Besides, through an instrumental variable
Environmental knowledge
Generalized propensity score (IV) approach, we document that with a 1% increase in environmental information disclosure, public environ­
mental concern can increase by 1.7%. Further mechanism analysis shows that environmental information
disclosure affects public environmental concern by enhancing people’s environmental risk perception and
environmental knowledge.

1. Introduction important instrument to combat pollution (Zhang et al., 2010).

Environmental information disclosure—a revolutionary environ­
mental management system complement to the conventional command-
and-control and market-based approaches—has become the third tide of
environmental regulation measures (Pan and Fan, 2021; Tietenberg and
van den Bergh, 1998). As a bottom-up strategy, environmental infor­
mation disclosure can reduce information asymmetry between the
public and the government (Barwick et al., 2019), and force the local
government and polluting enterprises to actively disclose various types
of environmental information that are of great interest (e.g., pollutant
emission amount, pollution damage on peoples’ potential health, and
governments’ pollution control approaches) to the general public (Feng,
2020; Li et al., 2021). Through these measures, it is well known that
environmental information disclosure plays an important role in
nurturing public understanding of environmental issues, enhancing
public environmental concern, and encouraging the public to participate
actively in environmental management (G. Li et al., 2018; Tu et al.,
2019; Wang and Zhou, 2021).
Over the last decade, environmental information disclosure has been
widely used in over 60 countries and regions around the world as an
Numerous studies and evidences indicate that environmental informa­
tion disclosure establishes a solid foundation for raising public envi­
ronmental concern. For example, Henry and Gordon (2003) found that
the air quality-related information disclosure in the U.S. is effective in
raising people’s environmental concern and encouraging them to reduce
the number of vehicles driving and traveling. Tu et al. (2020) has also
confirmed that information campaigns on climate change and air
pollution are effective in increasing public environmental concern and
their willingness to pay for improvements in environmental quality.
However, it remains unclear whether there is an optimal intensity of
environmental information disclosure in facilitating public environ­
mental concern, that is, whether there is a threshold effect of environ­
mental information disclosure. Figuring out the optimal intensity of
environmental information disclosure is crucial since it can avoid
wasteful system efficiency and save more human and financial re­
sources, this is especially notable in developing countries facing severe
financial constraints (Barwick et al., 2019). In this regard, we attempt to
find out the intensity of environmental information disclosure that op­
timizes public environmental concern.
Our contribution to the literature is two-fold. First, this is the first

* Corresponding author. Zhejiang A&F University Address: School of Economics and Management, Zhejiang A&F University, Zhejiang Province, 311300, China.
E-mail address: kongfanbin@aliyun.com (F. Kong).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2022.134640
Received 26 February 2022; Received in revised form 19 June 2022; Accepted 8 October 2022
Available online 14 October 2022
0959-6526/© 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
D. Pan et al.
study to provide empirical evidence as to the minimum threshold, where
the effect of environmental information disclosure can increase public
environmental concern for the first time, and the maximum threshold,
beyond which the effect of increasing environmental information
disclosure on public environmental concern, is decreasing. The paper
most relevant to ours is Barwick et al. (2019), which analyzed the impact
of whether or not disclosing environmental information on public
environmental behavior. Our study differs from Barwick et al. (2019) in
that—instead of analyzing whether or not disclosing environmental in­
formation, we analyze to what extent a higher environmental informa­
tion disclosure can generate higher or weaker effects on public
environmental concern than a lower environmental information
disclosure.
Second, we examined the potential mechanism of how environ­
mental information disclosure may affect public environmental concern.
We find that people’s risk perception and knowledge of environmental
pollution are two primary channels through which environmental in­
formation disclosure works. By exploring these underlying mechanisms,
this paper improves our understanding of how environmental informa­
tion disclosure evokes public risk perception, enhances environmental
knowledge, and thus changes public environmental concern, which has
important policy implications regarding applying environmental infor­
mation disclosure to combat pollution.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 reports
the literature review. The empirical frameworks, the data sources, and
the variables are introduced in Section 3. The empirical strategy is dis­
cussed in Section 4. Section 5 introduces the impact mechanism. The
conclusions of the paper are epitomized in Section 6.
2. Literature review
Public environmental concern has been regarded as one of the key
necessary factors to encourage people’s participation in environmental
protection and is conducive for the governments to make sound policies
and to the improvement of environmental quality (Li and Chen, 2018;
Liu et al., 2019). Substantial research has analyzed the driving factors of
public environmental concern, either focused on sociodemographic
factors——such as age (Liu et al., 2014; Gray et al., 2019), gender
(Mohai, 1992; Hunter et al., 2004), income (Liere and Dunlap, 1980; Liu
and Mu, 2016), residential location (Howell and Laska, 1992; Fransson
and Gärling, 1999), and education level (Liere and Dunlap, 1980;
Marquart-Pyatt, 2007), or macro contextual factors, such as regional
pollution (Wang et al., 2018; Hao and Song, 2020), population density
(Franzen and Vogl, 2013; Facchini et al., 2017), and economic devel­
opment (Franzen and Meyer, 2010; Liu and Mu, 2016; Hao and Song,
2020).
In recent years, with many countries considering environmental in­
formation disclosure strategy as an important measure to combat
pollution, the relationship between environmental information disclo­
sure and public environmental concern has attracted more and more
research attention. Jalan and Somanathan (2008) contended that
providing environmental information can solve information asymmetry
and thus can deepen the public’s understanding of environmental
quality. Henry and Gordon (2003) and Tu et al. (2020) both believed
that the disclosure of air quality information would adequately arouse
public environmental concern, which in turn change their behaviors.
Shen and Sun (2020) found that popularizing environmental knowledge
to the public can raise their environmental concerns and guide their
behavior. Li et al. (2018) believed that pollution information can spread
quickly and arouse public widespread concern about the environment.
Li and Zhang (2020) asserted that environmental information disclosure
is in the form of public environmental concern to force local govern­
ments and companies to complete environmental rectification. Wang
et al. (2018) pointed out that when the public learns about specific
environmental risks through environmental information, their envi­
ronmental concerns naturally arise. Peng and Zhong (2018) thought that
2
Journal of Cleaner Production 379 (2022) 134640
the public can learn about the country’s environmental policies through
the environmental information disclosed by the government, which
helps to deepen their attention to environmental quality.
Through combing the above-mentioned literature, we can find that
environmental information disclosure is beneficial to increase public
environmental concern, but the existing literature does not explore the
relationship, especially the non-linear relationship, between the two in
detail, and further investigation is still worth continuing. We use the
method of combining GPS and IV to eliminate the endogenous problems
in the research as much as possible, try to find the most suitable interval
for the influence of environmental information disclosure on public
environmental concern, and explore the possible mechanism between
the two.
3. Method and data
3.1. Method
3.1.1. Generalized propensity score approach
There are three potential endogenous issues when evaluating the
effect of environmental information disclosure on public environmental
concern. First, environmental information disclosure has endogenous
problems caused by sample self-selection. Seligsohn et al. (2018) con­
tended that the environmental information disclosed by the local gov­
ernments is non-random, in that the local governments can act
independently and self-select to disclose the extent of environmental
information. Han (2010) even found that local governments with better
performance are more willing (i.e. self-select) to disclose environmental
information. Second, there are endogenous problems of simultaneous
causality between environmental information disclosure and public
environmental concern. Shen and Feng (2012) found areas with higher
public environment concern are more likely to disclose environmental
information due to the pressure from the public hence. Finally, the
public environmental concern may be affected by unobserved factors,
such as individuals’ environmental motivation, environmental prefer­
ence, and risk attitude, which may lead to biased estimates.
In order to deal with these three endogenous issues, we apply a
combination of the GPS approach and the IV method. GPS approach is an
alternative means of conducting propensity score-matching, which can
remove self-select deviations in the comparison of treatment groups so
that the effectiveness of environmental information disclosure can be
assessed. Instead of estimating the average impact of environmental
information disclosure in propensity score matching, GPS can estimate
the marginal effectiveness of environmental information disclosure at
different intensities (Hirano and Imbens, 2004). Thus, by applying GPS,
we can estimate the intensity of environmental information disclosure
that optimize public environmental concern, which can allow us to
figure out the interval with the highest effect of environmental infor­
mation disclosure and thus provide suggestions for policy implementa­
tion. Furthermore, the GPS approach does not need to discrete
continuous treatment so that it can make full use of rich information
(Kluve et al., 2012). GPS is a relatively new method in treatment effects
evaluation. To the best of our knowledge, we are aware that a few
studies have employed GPS in assessing the impact of innovation on
farm economic sustainability (Läpple and Thorne, 2019), the role of
agri-environment schemes in environmental management (Bartolini
et al., 2021), the treatment effects of agricultural technologies (Kumar
et al., 2017; Sheldon and DeShazo, 2017). However, no paper has yet
assessed environmental information disclosure impact by applying this
method.
The implementation process of GPS can be divided into three stages
(Hirano and Imbens, 2004):
First stage: estimating the GPS ( R̂ ij ) of environmental information
disclosure under the condition of controlling for an observed serious of
covariates.
D. Pan et al.
Due to our treatment variable—environmental information disclo­
sure is a continuous variable, following Hirano and Imbens (2004), we
used the maximum likelihood estimation method to estimate the con­
ditional probability density of environmental information disclosure.
Therefore, the conditional probability of environmental information
disclosure can be calculated as:
( )⃒ { ( ) }
g EIDj ⃒Xij ≈ N f βXij , σ2 (1)
Where EIDj denotes the intensity of environmental information disclo­
sure of j city, i represents each resident, Xij represents all covariates,
f(βXij ) is a function of all control variables with linear terms, which
depends on a vector of parameters β. According to the assumption of
conditional independence, the intensity of environmental information
disclosure is independent of public environmental concern, and envi­
ronmental information disclosure with similar individual characteristics
is randomly allocated. Under the condition of covariates Xij , the GPS
(R
̂ ij ) of environmental information disclosure is estimated as:
( )
1 1 ( ( ) )2
̂ ij = √̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅
R exp − √̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅ g EIDj − ̂
β0 − ̂
β1 Xij
2π ̂ σ2 2̂ σ2
Where R ̂ ij represents the GPS of resident i in city j. The remaining var­
iables are the same as Equation (1). The estimation result of Equation (1)
is mainly used to calculate the GPS of formula (2), and the GPS obtained
by Equation (2) is ready for the second-stage conditional expectation
model.
Second stage: estimating the conditional expectation of outcome
(public environmental concern) given GPS and environmental infor­
mation disclosure intensity.
Analogous to the propensity score matching for binary dummy var­
iable, the GPS approach also has a balancing property test that needs to
be met. After passing the balancing property test, we assessed the con­
ditional expectation of public environmental concern as a function of
two target variables—the environmental information disclosure in­
tensity EIDj and the GPS R ̂ ij . A conditional expectation model can be
constructed:
( ⃒ ) We use the following question in the CGSS2013 questionnaire to
E Yij ⃒EIDj , R
̂ ij = α0 + α1 EIDj + α2 EID2j + α3 R ̂ 2ij + α5 EIDj × R
̂ ij + α4 R
The estimation of Equation (3) is mainly used to calculate the
average conditional expectation of public environmental concern and as
an examination of whether the covariates in Equation (1) lead into any
deviation (Hirano and Imbens, 2004).
Third stage: estimating the dose-response function and treatment
effect function.
Based on the results of the above Equations, the environmental
attention of each respondent can be predicted. Specifically, the
replacement of the processing intensity value (EID) by the processing
variable (e), and the score value (R) to the score value estimation
function (r(e, X)) is performed. The image of the value range of the
average dose-response function can be fitted, and the average environ­
mental concern function DS(e) of each information disclosure intensity
value (e) can be calculated as follows:
1 N {
∑ }
̂
DS(e) = α0 + ̂
̂ ̂ 2 e2j + α
α 1 ej + α α 4 ̂r (e, x)2 + ̂
̂ 3 ̂r (e, x) + ̂
N j=1
Equation (4) is the dose-response function. We calculate DS(e)
̂ for
each intensity of environmental information disclosure to obtain a net
effect of the whole equation. The bootstrapping technique, accounting
for the estimation of the parameters α and GPS, is used to compute
standard errors and confidence intervals via bootstrapping with 100
iterations. Apart from the dose-response function, we also calculate the
marginal effects of environmental information disclosure, which can be
Journal of Cleaner Production 379 (2022) 134640
called the treatment effect function. Finally, we calculated the treatment
effect function as follows:
( ) ( )
̂
TE(e) ̂ ej + 1 − DS
= DS ̂ ej ∀eεEID (5)
3.1.2. Instrumental variable method
One disadvantage of the GPS is that its selection relies on observed
factors. If there are endogenous problems of simultaneous causality and
other unobservable factors influencing the public judgment of infor­
mation, the results from the GPS approach are likely to be biased. Thus,
we use the IV method as a supplement. IV method corrects these po­
tential endogenous issues as long as requirements for an instrument are
met (Brahm and Tarziján, 2014). Thus, following Thapa et al. (2018), we
apply the IV method as a supplement to minimize the endogenous
problems in our research. The two-stage least squares (2SLS) method is
used to deal with these issues as follows:
EIDj = γ 0 + γ1 Inj + Xijτ γ + μij (6)
̂j + Xijτ δ + θij
Yij = δ0 + δ1 EID (7)
(2)
Where Yij denotes the public environmental concern, and Inj is the
instrumental variable. μij and θij are error terms supposed to be inde­
pendently and identically distributed. The remaining variables are the
same as Equation (1).
3.2. Data and variables
To evaluate the net effect of environmental information disclosure
on public environmental concern, we collect the data of public envi­
ronmental concern from CGSS2013, the data of the intensity of envi­
ronmental information disclosure at the city level, which was
announced by the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE)
and the US Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and other social-
economic data from China City Statistical Yearbook 2013.
3.2.1. Dependent variable: public environmental concern from CGSS2013
̂ ij (3) measure the public environmental concern:
“In the last year, have you taken the initiative to pay attention to
pollution problems and environmental information reported in
radio, television, and newspapers?”
If the interviewees choose “no”, then the variable is 0, and if the
interviewees choose yes, the variable is 1.
The CGSS2013 questionnaire employs the multistage probability
sampling procedure to extract 100 county-level units as primary sam­
pling units. In total, the CGSS2013 data includes 11438 sampled
households, covering 31 province-level regions in Mainland China, and
a total of 89 cities (excluding Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan). It is the
Chinese earliest national, all-ground, and successive academic investi­
gate item. So, using the CGSS2013 data to measure public environ­
mental concern is representative.
3.2.2. Treatment variable: the intensity of environmental information
α 5 ̂r (e, x) × ej
disclosure
The main explanatory variable is the intensity of environmental in­
(4)
formation disclosure. So as to systematically evaluate the intensity of
environmental information disclosure in China, the IPE and the NRDC
together developed the Pollution Source Regulatory Information
Disclosure Index (PITI). According to the index, the environmental in­
formation disclosure status of selected cities is evaluated and scored year
by year.
The PITI has systematically evaluated the environmental informa­
tion disclosure condition of 113 cities in China and can reflect the in­
tensity of local environmental information disclosure (Tian et al., 2016;
3
D. Pan et al.
Fig. 1. Eight aspects of environmental information disclosure in the
PITI System.
Seligsohn et al., 2018). This is because PITI discloses eight aspects of
environmental information that are connected with the environmental
behavior of local governments and enterprises, including the informa­
tion of “enterprise’s daily violations”, “pollution control charges”,
“clean production audit” and so on (see Fig. 1).
We manually sorted out the messages of the 113 cities releasing PITI
reports and matched them with the data of CGSS2013 and other social-
economic data. Since the explained variable in the paper is the public
environmental concern in 2013, we choose the PITI scores in 2012.
Besides, to prove the reliability of our conclusions, we also use PITI
scores in 2011 as an explanatory variable in the sensitivity test. Fig. 2
shows the distribution of PITI scores in 2012 and 2011 across China. It
can be found that the intensity of environmental information disclosure
varies greatly in different regions in China, indicating that there may be
self-selection bias in environmental information disclosure.
3.2.3. Control variables
As we stated in the literature review section, public environmental
concern is not only affected by sociodemographic factors but also macro
contextual factors (Facchini et al., 2017; Hao and Song, 2020). There­
fore, we selected control variables influencing public environmental
concern from the micro-individual level and macro-city level to obtain
the unbiased effects of environmental information disclosure on public
Fig. 2. The distribution of PITI scores in 2012 and 2011 across China.
4
Journal of Cleaner Production 379 (2022) 134640
environmental concern. Micro-individual control variables include an
individual’s gender, age, education, marriage, income, working condi­
tion, living location, and political status (Liere and Dunlap, 1980;
Marquart-Pyatt, 2007; Liu and Mu, 2016; Gray et al., 2019). Macro-city
level control variables include the city’s economic development level,
population density, and pollution level (Franzen and Vogl, 2013; Fac­
chini et al., 2017; Hao and Song, 2020).
3.2.4. Merging the above data
We merge the environmental information disclosure data at the
macro-city level with the public environmental concern data and other
control variables data at the micro-individual level from CGSS 2013 as
follows: First, we manually collected the environmental information
disclosure data of 113 prefecture-level cities in 2012 and 2011 through
the PITI reports, and then we merged them with the data of CGSS 2013
according to the name of the prefecture-level city. The CGSS 2013 sur­
veyed 41 cities of the 113 prefecture-level cities containing environ­
mental information disclosure data; therefore, we got a total of 41 cities
with a sample of 6622 residents.
Second, we merged the 6622 residents with their corresponding
macro-city level control variable data through the China City Statistical
Yearbook in 2013.
Third, in order to reduce the skewness of the data, we take the nat­
ural logarithm of the non-proportional and non-discrete continuous
variables (i.e., income, per GDP, density, and pollution) in the model of
GPS and IV.
The summary statistics of the key variables are shown in Table 1. The
numbers in Table 1 represent the means with standard bias in brackets
beneath, and the demarcation points for the three groups of environ­
mental information disclosure intensity were chosen to get roughly
average numbers in each group. By dividing all respondents into three
environmental information disclosure groups, we can find that public
environmental concern and other covariates have differed considerably
among respondents with different intensities of environmental infor­
mation disclosure. For example, a respondent with low intensities of
environmental information disclosure in group 1 has an average of
10.7% in public environmental concern lower than a respondent in
group 2. The considerable difference in characteristics among various
groups indicates there may be a problem of sample self-selection in
environmental information disclosure and we have to use methods to
control for selection bias.
D. Pan et al. Journal of Cleaner Production 379 (2022) 134640

Table 1
Summary statistics of the key variables.
Variables Definition All sample Group 1 [20, Group 2 Group 3
39.1] (39.1, 65.5] (65.5, 85.3]

Public environmental In the most recent year, have you taken the initiative to pay attention to environmental 0.497 0.504 0.558 (0.497) 0.478 (0.500)
concern issues: 0 = no, 1 = yes (0.500) (0.500)
EID2012 Environmental information disclosure scores in 2012 51.341 28.001 52.987 70.747
(18.543) (5.665) (5.959) (4.089)
EID2011 Environmental information disclosure scores in 2011 47.015 26.805 44.680 66.987
(19.279) (9.300) (11.942) (7.138)
Gender 0 = female, 1 = male 0.503 0.506 0.492 (0.500) 0.505 (0.500)
(0.500) (0.500)
Age Age in yeas 48.507 47.158 47.934 49.214
(16.388) (16.430) (16.457) (16.324)
Education 0 = have elementary education and below, 1 = have a middle school education, 2 = 1.126 1.099 1.294 (1.193) 1.088 (1.070)
have vocational education, 3 = have adult education, 4 = have a college education and (1.172) (1.144)
above
Marriage 0 = no partner, 1 = have a partner 0.794 0.793 0.784 (0.411) 0.797 (0.402)
(0.404) (0.405)
Working condition 0 = no job, 1 = have a job 0.626 0.621 0.617 (0.486) 0.630 (0.483)
(0.484) (0.485)
Urban people 0 = live in the countryside, 1 = live in the urban city 0.614 0.415 0.701 (0.458) 0.593 (0.491)
(0.487) (0.493)
Political status 0 = non-party members, 1 = party member 0.102 0.105 0.102 (0.302) 0.101 (0.302)
(0.303) (0.306)
Lnincome Family’s net income 8.278 8.068 8.597 (3.354) 8.248 (3.514)
(3.506) (3.062)
LnperGDP GDP per capita 11.145 11.077 11.572 11.037
(0.682) (0.345) (0.367) (0.780)
Lndensity Population per square kilometer 0.054 0.032 0.062 (0.025) 0.589 (0.052)
(0.044) (0.020)
Lnpollution Wastewater discharge per square kilometer 1.075 0.517 1.307 (0.938) 1.190 (2.048)
(1.683) (0.509)
Observations (n) / 6622 2160 2156 2422

Notes: The figures are means with standard bias in brackets beneath; the demarcation points for the environmental information disclosure groups were chosen to get
roughly average numbers in each group.

Table 2
The influencing factors of environmental information disclosure.
Variables Coefficient Standard error

Gender 0.005 0.007

Age 0.001*** 0.000
Education − 0.010*** 0.003
Marriage − 0.005 0.008
Working condition 0.023** 0.009
Urban people − 0.092*** 0.000
Political status 0.007 0.010
Lnincome − 0.003** 0.001
LnperGDP 0.313*** 0.019
Lndensity 1.437*** 0.332
Lnpollution − 0.026*** 0.003
Cons − 1.458*** 0.112
City FE Yes
Obs 5743
AIC 9.736
BIC − 49110.82

Fig. 3. The scatter diagram of environmental information disclosure and the Notes: *** and ** represent the 1% and 5% significance levels, respectively.
public environmental concern. Notes: The X-axis is the environmental infor­
mation disclosure scores, the Y-axis is the mean value of environmental concern
at the city level, and the shaded area is the 95% confidence interval.

4. Empirical estimation results
4.1. The effects of environmental information disclosure on
environmental concern using a nonparametric analysis
We start with a nonparametric analysis to take a first look at the
association between environmental information disclosure and public
environmental concern. Specifically, we calculate the average value of
public environmental concern at the city level and plot the scatter dia­
gram of the relationship between it and environmental information
disclosure scores. As shown in Fig. 3, we can find that public environ­
mental concern has an obviously positive relationship with the intensity
of environmental information disclosure. In spite of there being some
covariates that are uncontrolled, this obvious drawing at least lends
some support to the view that environmental information disclosure is
beneficial to the improvement of public environmental concern. We next
verify the relationship between environmental information disclosure
and public environmental concern from the perspective of GPS and IV
methods.

5
D. Pan et al. Journal of Cleaner Production 379 (2022) 134640

Table 3
Balancing property test given the GPS for the environmental information disclosure.
Variables Unadjusted Adjust

[20–39.1] [39.1–65.5] [65.5–85.3] [20–39.1] [39.1–65.5] [65.5–85.3]

Gender 1.34 − 1.10 0.60 0.92 0.76 − 0.24

Age − 4.53*** − 3.13*** 5.28*** − 1.00 0.77 − 1.60
Education − 2.39** 7.00*** − 4.65*** 0.86 1.16 1.52
Marriage − 0.13 2.04** 1.05 − 0.12 − 1.31 − 0.95
Working − 1.62 − 1.41 1.14 0.67 − 1.26 0.35
Urban people − 1.13 9.37*** − 6.23*** 0.58 0.72 1.31
Political status 0.46 1.18 4.68*** 0.24 − 0.11 1.18
Lnincome − 2.90*** 4.57*** − 1.14 0.47 − 0.75 − 1.63
LnperGDP − 7.83*** 47.75*** − 24.10*** 3.70*** 0.56 − 5.73***
Lndensity − 41.04*** 13.31*** 15.67*** 8.09*** − 2.93*** − 6.36***
Lnpollution − 30.66*** 10.06*** 10.06*** − 5.63*** 1.52 − 3.40***

Notes: The reported numbers are t-Statistics. *** and** represent the 1% and 5% significance levels, respectively.

(Dasgupta et al., 2002; Tian et al., 2016). Besides, the residents in cities
Table 4
with a larger population have more demand for government information
Second stage results.
disclosure (Estellermore and Otero, 2012). At last, local officials are
Variables Public environmental concern more willing to disclose information that can reflect their achievements,
Coefficient Standard error therefore, the better the environmental performance, the more envi­
EID 0.782*** 0.197 ronmental information is provided (Han, 2010).
EID2 − 0.004*** 0.001
R 4333.469*** 1132.368 4.2.2. The result of balancing property test and conditional equation
R2 − 124978.4*** 33376.34 estimation
EID × R − 36.960*** 11.594
Cons − 40.307*** 9.607
In order to examine the balancing property of the included cova­
riates, we divided the intensity of environmental information disclosure
Notes: ***represents the 1% significance level. into three interval groups according to Table 1, and test whether the
mean in one of the three environmental information disclosure intensity
4.2. The effects of environmental information disclosure on groups was obviously different from the mean in the other two-interval
environmental concern using a GPS approach groups. Table 3 presents the t-tests statistics for the difference-in-means
of three environmental information disclosure groups with and without
Before analyzing the results from the GPS approach, we need to adjusting for the GPS. It can be obviously found that the t-statistics for
present clear information on the three estimation steps and the most of the control variables were insignificant after adjusting the GPS,
balancing property test. According to the three estimation steps of GPS, indicating that the GPS is beneficial to narrow the deviation connected
the formulas (1), (2), and (3) are respectively estimated. with the difference in control variables, and the balancing property was
satisfied at a level lower than 0.01 after a standard two-sided t-test,
4.2.1. The results of propensity scores calculation meeting the balancing property test.
The first estimation is to obtain the propensity scores of the sample Since our treatment variable—the intensity of environmental infor­
cities and the results are shown in Table 2, showing that most of the mation disclosure is continuous, we cannot calculate the average con­
selected covariates have passed the significance test, which reflects the ditional expectation of the explained variable by comparing the
rationality of the covariates selection. In addition, we can find that cities explained variable of treated versus control groups like propensity score
with better economic development, greater population density, and matching. Thus, we need to make conditional expectations as a flexible
better environmental quality are more likely to disclose environmental function of the environmental information disclosure intensity and GPS.
information. This is because people living in cities with higher GDP Specifically, we use public environmental concern as the explained
generally demand more environmental information disclosure since the variable and use the environmental information disclosure intensity and
environmental quality is usually preferred by the richer people GPS obtained in the first step as the explanatory variables for OLS

Fig. 4. Average and marginal effects of environmental information disclosure on public environmental concern.

6
D. Pan et al. Journal of Cleaner Production 379 (2022) 134640

estimation. The regression results of the second stage are shown in Table 5
Table 4. The estimated coefficients of the second stage have no direct The causal effects of different environmental information disclosure intensities.
explanatory significance, except that examining if the coefficients Environmental Average Standard Marginal Standard
relating to the GPS (R) are equal to zero and can be treated as an ex­ information disclosure effect error effect error
amination of whether the covariates introduce a deviation (Hirano and intensity
Imbens, 2004). We can find in Table 4 that the coefficients relating to the 20 0.253*** 0.002 0.022*** 0.000
GPS (R) are significantly different from zero, indicating that our cova­ 25 0.326*** 0.001 0.020*** 0.000
riates do not introduce deviation. 30 0.356*** 0.000 0.019*** 0.000
35 0.376*** 0.000 0.017*** 0.000
40 0.402*** 0.001 0.015*** 0.000
4.2.3. The result of average and marginal effects of environmental 45 0.437*** 0.001 0.012*** 0.000
information disclosure on public environmental concern 50 0.475*** 0.001 0.011*** 0.000
The third estimation is to construct a dose-response curve and 55 0.509*** 0.001 0.010*** 0.000
60 0.534*** 0.000 0.010*** 0.000
calculate its marginal effect on the treated by using the results of the first
65 0.548*** 0.000 0.012*** 0.000
two steps. Fig. 4 shows the results of the third estimation. The figure on 70 0.546*** 0.000 0.015*** 0.000
the left is the dose-response function, which represents the average ef­ 75 0.526*** 0.001 0.022*** 0.000
fect of environmental information disclosure. The figure on the right is 80 0.481*** 0.001 0.033*** 0.000
the treatment effect function, which represents the marginal effect of the Notes: ***represents the 1% significance level.
treatment variable. The solid line is the GPS estimated using the core
model parameters, reflecting the non-linearity effect of environmental
information disclosure on public environmental concern. The confi­ Table 6
dence intervals of the dose-response function and treatment-effect Results of the instrument variable test.
function are assessed by bootstrapping and are included in Fig. 4 as Variables 2SLS First stage
upper and lower dashed lines.
Environmental Environmental
Fig. 4 shows that the effect of environmental information disclosure concern information disclosure
on public environmental concern generally increases with higher envi­
Environmental information 0.017***(0.006)
ronmental information disclosure intensities, and no matter what the
disclosure
intensity of environmental information disclosure, its effect on public The number of newspaper 0.388***(0.058)
environmental concern is always positively correlated. This result in­ categories
dicates that after the problem of sample selection bias is eliminated, Covariates Yes Yes
City FE Yes Yes
environmental information disclosure can significantly enhance public
Obs 5369 5369
attention to the environment. The main reason is that the environmental Relevancy test (F-statistics) 45.30
information disclosure allows the public to understand the environ­ Under identification test (LM 45.01
mental risks around them and to supervise the country’s environmental statistics)
protection work, thereby increasing their enthusiasm for environmental Weak identification test (Cragg- 45.96
Donald Wald F statistics)
concerns (Wang et al., 2018; Peng and Zhong, 2018).
However, environmental information disclosure has a non-linear Notes: The robust standard errors are reported in parentheses. *** represents the
impact on public environmental concern. The effects firstly increase 1% significance level.
and then decrease as the rise of environmental information disclosure
intensity, presents an inverted “U” shape, indicating there is a threshold significant test to prove reliable. Furthermore, we also want to figure out
intensity for the effectiveness of environmental information disclosure. the optimal environmental information disclosure intensity, that is, the
Beyond this threshold, the effect of environmental information disclo­ specific inflection point of the curve. Thus, as a final step of our esti­
sure begins to diminish. Only when the environmental information mation, we list the average effect and the marginal effect of environ­
disclosure is within the appropriate range, can the effectiveness of the mental information disclosure with different intensities in Table 5 to
information be maximized. The main reasons for the inverted U shape prove the significance of the results and shed light on how much the
relationship between environmental information disclosure and envi­ intensity of environmental information disclosure can maximize the
ronmental concern are as follows. When the intensity of environmental average treatment effect. We can find that the inflection point of envi­
information disclosure is in a very low range, it would not attract enough ronmental information disclosure is between 65 and 70, indicating that
attention from the public (Rickertsen et al., 1995). Thus its impact on the intensity of environmental information disclosure within this range
public environmental concern is relatively low at first. As the intensity of can maximize public attention to environmental issues. This result
environmental information disclosure increases, the public will suggests that only a moderate interval of environmental information
increasingly feel the importance of environmental quality brought about disclosure can draw the public active attention to environmental issues.
by environmental information (Jalan and Somanathan, 2008), and That is, with the intensity of environmental information disclosure
begin to pay more attention to environmental issues. But when the becoming higher than 70, the effect of environmental information
provision of environmental information exceeds the threshold, the disclosure on public environmental concern will reduce, which will lead
public may no longer pay attention to the environmental quality posed to the loss of efficiency in the government department and results in
by environmental information. This is because the marginal utility of human and financial resources waste. Thus, when the government
environmental information begins to diminish when it continues to be department properly controls the intensity of environmental informa­
provided. According to the theory of diminishing marginal utility, in a tion disclosure, it can effectively improve public environmental aware­
certain period, when environmental information is continuously pro­ ness and encourage them to participate in environmentally friendly
vided, the increase in utility that the public obtains from each unit of behaviors to the greatest extent, which can save human and financial
environmental information is diminishing. Thus, when the intensity of resources.
environmental information disclosure exceeds the threshold, its impact
on public environmental concern begins to diminish. 4.3. The effects of environmental information disclosure on
Although the dose-response curve of Fig. 4 reflects the dynamic environmental concern using an instrumental variable approach
relationship between the environmental information disclosure and the
public environmental concern, this causal effect needs to pass a As stated in the method section, we further use the IV method as a

7
D. Pan et al.
Fig. 5. Placebo-style test. Note: The X-axis represents the estimated coefficient
of EIDfalse from 500 random assignments. The curve is the estimated kernel
j
density distribution, and the points are the associated p-values.
supplement to minimize the endogenous problems in our research.
Specially, the number of newspaper categories in each region is adopted
as an instrumental variable of environmental information disclosure.
The reasons we choose this instrumental variable are as follows. First,
the number of newspaper categories in each region reflects the fre­
quency and quantity of information circulation in a region (Shi et al.,
2019), which is diametrically related to the propagation of information
produced by environmental information disclosure, satisfying the rele­
vant condition. Second, most categories of newspapers are not related to
the environment, thus the number of newspaper types is not directly
related to residents’ environmental concerns, satisfying the exogenous
condition. Based on these, we use the 2SLS approach to estimate the
impact of environmental information disclosure on public environ­
mental concern.
The regression results are presented in Table 6. The results of the first
stage in column 2 show that a positive and significant association be­
tween the number of newspaper categories in each region with envi­
ronmental information disclosure, and our results have passed the
relevancy test, under-identification test, and weak identification test,
indicating that the number of newspaper categories is a strong and valid
instrument. The regression results of 2SLS show that environmental
information disclosure still significantly aroused public attention to
environmental issues after solving the endogenous problem of simulta­
neous causality and missing unobservable variables, and a 1% increase
in environmental information disclosure is associated with 1.7% in
Fig. 6. GPS results of alternating environmental information disclosure.
8
Journal of Cleaner Production 379 (2022) 134640
public environmental concern.
4.4. Sensitivity test
We carry out an extensive set of tests to further justify the validity of
the impact of environmental information disclosure on public environ­
mental concerns. These include a falsification test, a replacement of key
explanatory variable test, a winsorizing extreme values test and a het­
eroskedasticity test.
4.4.1. Excluding the effect of non-observable factors
Following Imbens and Wooldridge (2009), we conduct a falsification
test to test whether our regression results are affected by non-observable
factors. Specifically, we estimate a pseudo average treatment effect by
randomly assigning cities to different intensities of environmental in­
formation disclosure and test whether the pseudo average treatment
effect is not significant as expected. We randomly disrupt environmental
information disclosure cities through computers and construct a virtual
false
explanatory variable EIDj for OLS regression. As shown in the
following Equation (8):
( ⃒ )
cov EIDfalse , εij ⃒control
̂
β =β + λ (
j
⃒ ) (8)
var EIDfalse ⃒control
j
Where control represents all control variables that are observable, β is
the true coefficient of environmental information disclosure’s impact on
public environmental concern and ̂ β is the coefficient of model fitting, If
our regression results are not affected by non-observable factors, then λ
should be zero and β is an unbiased estimate. But the difficulty lies in
that it is impossible to know whether λ is 0 and thus it is impossible to
directly test whether the estimation result will be affected by non-
observed factors. If we use computer simulation to let environmental
information disclosure have no impact on public environmental
concern, then ̂β = 0 can be estimated and λ can be deduced to be zero.
In order to improve the recognizability of the placebo-style test, this
process is performed 500 times through a computer stochastic simulate.
Fig. 5 reports the probability distribution of the coefficients and their
associated significance levels. It can be clearly seen that the distribution
is concentrated near 0, and most of the estimated P-values are greater
than 0.1. These results indicate that our regression results are not
affected by other non-observable factors and are robust.
4.4.2. Alternative treatment variable
In the benchmark regression, our treatment variable is environ­
mental information disclosure data in 2012. So as to guarantee the
reliability of the research conclusions, we also use the environmental
D. Pan et al. Journal of Cleaner Production 379 (2022) 134640

Table 7 is equal to 0.000, indicating that there is indeed a heteroscedasticity

IV results of alternating environmental information disclosure. issue in the model. And then, we analyze the reasons for the existence of
Variables 2SLS First stage the heteroskedasticity problem and correct it.
In existing studies, the heteroskedasticity problem has been solved in
Public Environmental information
environmental disclosure in 2011
concern
Table 8
Environmental information 0.006***(0.002)
IV Results of winsorizing extreme values.
disclosure in 2011
The number of newspaper 1.187***(0.061) Variables 2SLS First stage
categories
Public environmental Environmental information
City F.E. Yes Yes
concern disclosure in 2012
Obs 5611 5611
Covariates Yes Yes Environmental 0.016***(0.006)
R2 0.471 information disclosure
The number of 0.387***(0.058)
Notes: The robust standard errors are reported in parentheses. *** represents the
newspaper types
1% significance level. City F.E. Yes Yes
Obs 5611 5611
information disclosure data in 2011 to do a robust test to see if the re­ Covariates Yes Yes
R2 0.471
sults of the two years are significantly different. If the results of 2011 and
2012 are obviously inconsistent, it means that the research conclusions Notes: The robust standard errors are reported in parentheses. *** represents the
have yet to be observed, otherwise, it means that the research conclu­ 1% significance level.
sions are robust. The regression results of replacing the treatment vari­
able based on the GPS model and IV method are shown in Fig. 6 and
Table 9
Table 7. It can be discovered that both the results in Fig. 6 and Table 7
The result of the White test.
are consistent with the basic estimations.
Source Chi2 P

4.4.3. Winsorizing extreme values Heteroskedasticity 688.62*** 0.000

In benchmark regression, a possible problem is that extreme values Skewness 1493.61*** 0.000
Kurtosis 876.95 *** 0.000
will affect the reliability of the conclusion. If these samples are taken
into consideration, it will undoubtedly affect the effect of environmental Notes: *** represents the 1% significance levels.
information disclosure. Thus, we remove the up and bottom 1% of the
samples to reduce the effect of the extreme values. The regression results
of winsorizing extreme values based on the GPS model and IV method Table 10
The results of using WLS to estimate model.
are shown in Fig. 7 and Table 8. We can find that the results are nearly
consistent with the main results. Variables Public environmental concern

Coefficient Standard error

4.4.4. Heteroskedasticity test
EID 0.033** 0.015
Since the existence of heteroscedasticity may lead to inaccurate Covariates Yes
estimation in the linear regression model, it is really important to pay City FE Yes
attention to verifying the existence of heteroscedasticity and solving the Obs 5736
R2 0.188
interference of heteroskedasticity on estimation results. Specifically, we
Cons 5.206*** 1.984
firstly test whether there is a heteroskedasticity in the model by the
White test. The results are shown in Table 9. We can find that the p-value Notes: *** and ** represent the 1% and 5% significance levels, respectively.

Fig. 7. GPS Results of winsorizing extreme values.

9
D. Pan et al.
three main ways: using the robust standard errors; taking logarithms of
the dependent variable; and using the weighted least squares (WLS) to
estimate the model (Romano et al., 2017). In our above analysis, we
have already used robust standard errors to deal with the hetero­
skedasticity problem. Since our dependent variable is a binary dummy
variable, we cannot take the logarithms of the dependent variable. Thus,
we use the WLS method to correct the heteroskedasticity issue again.
The results are shown in Table 10. We can find that after further cor­
recting the heteroskedasticity problem of the model, the coefficient of
environmental information disclosure remains significantly positive,
which is consistent with the baseline results, indicating that the exis­
tence of heteroscedasticity will not affect our baseline estimation.
5. Impact mechanism analysis
The results of the above have already proved that environmental
information disclosure can significantly improve public environmental
concern, and this impact is non-linear. Next, we investigate the possible
mechanisms of this impact. Based on the existing studies, the possible
explanations for public environmental concern improvement are two:
one is the awareness effect, and the other is the knowledge effect.
The awareness effect means that environmental information disclo­
sure can evoke public risk perception about the pollution issues, thereby
increasing their environmental concern. In China, environmental in­
formation is not transparent, and the public does not perceive the seri­
ousness of environmental issues and underestimates their demand for
environmental quality (Jalan and Somanathan, 2008). Environmental
information disclosure can solve these problems by enhancing envi­
ronmental information transparency (Peng and Zhong, 2018) and
making the public know more about the situation of pollution issues
around them. When the public perceives environmental pollution
around them, it will prompt them to pay attention to the environment
(Franzen and Meyer, 2010). This phenomenon is proven in previous
studies. For example, Liebler and Bendix (1996) has found that the
environmental information reported by the government plays a vital
role in shaping public risk perception on the environment. Wang et al.
(2018) pointed out that environmental risk perception is the most direct
factor of public environmental concern. Thus, we believe that environ­
mental information disclosure can affect public environmental concern
through the awareness effect.
With reference to Gong and Du (2019), we compute individuals’
environmental risk perception scores based on the data in CGSS2013. In
CGSS2013, each respondent is asked to select the harmfulness of envi­
ronmental problems in their living area, including 12 kinds of envi­
ronmental problems—water pollution, noise pollution, air pollution,
domestic waste pollution, insufficient green space, land quality degra­
dation, industrial waste pollution, shortage of water resources, forest
vegetation destruction, wildlife reduction, desertification, and food
pollution. The answer to these questions is seven: 1 for “has no such
problem”, 2 for “I Don’t care”, 3 for “General serious”, 4 for “Not
serious”, 5 for “Not too serious”, 6 for “serious”, and 7 for “Very serious”.
We use the average value of these 12 questions to represent each in­
dividual’s environmental risk perception score.
The knowledge effect means that environmental information
disclosure can educate people about the status and damage of pollution
and enhance their environmental knowledge, thereby increasing their
environmental concern. Information is the main source of knowledge
learned by individuals (Brucks, 1985). Peng and Zhong (2018) contend
that the government’s environmental information disclosure can pro­
mote the public learning more knowledge about environmental pollu­
tion. The knowledge of environmental pollution has always been
regarded by scholars as an important driving factor for
pro-environmental behavior (Vicente-Molina et al., 2013; Carmi et al.,
2015). Pothitou et al. (2016) found that the more environmental
pollution knowledge an individual has, the stronger his environmental
awareness. Thus, we believe that environmental information disclosure
10
Journal of Cleaner Production 379 (2022) 134640
can affect the public environmental concern through the knowledge
effect.
With reference to Wang et al. (2018), we compute individuals’
environmental pollution knowledge scores based on the CGSS2013
questionnaire. 10 sentences of environmental questions are presented to
each respondent and they have to give their judgments whether these
sentences are correct or wrong. Especially, each respondent is asked to
answer the following 10 questions: automobile exhaust doesn’t intro­
duce a threat to human health, excessive use of pesticides and fertilizers
will damage the environment, the use of phosphorous detergent will not
lead to water pollution, the fluorine emission of fluorine-containing
refrigerators will be one of the factors that destroy the ozone layer of
the atmosphere, burning coal will not produce acid rain, the disap­
pearance of a species will have a chain reaction in that species are
interdependent, class III air quality means better than class I air quality
in the air quality report, a single species of the forest is more likely to
cause diseases and pests, the water quality of class V is better than that of
class I in the water pollution report, the increase of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere will become a factor in climate warming. If they get a cor­
rect answer, they get one point, and if they get a wrong answer or don’t
know, they get zero points. We use the average value of these 10
questions to represent each individual’s environmental knowledge
score.
Generally speaking, we can use the three-step mediating effect model
based on full sample to empirically test the above two impact mecha­
nisms if the relationship between environmental information disclosure
and public environmental concern is linear. However, as our results
show that the relationship between environmental information disclo­
sure and environmental concern is inverted U-shaped, thus this three-
step mediating effect model based on full sample is no longer suitable.
Kang et al. (2018) pointed out the three-step mediating effect model
based on subsamples can be used to verify nonlinear intermediary effect.
Specifically, the intermediary effect test of subsamples can observe
whether the awareness effect and the knowledge effect of environmental
information disclosure are significant under different intervals of envi­
ronmental information disclosure intensity. If the coefficient of the
mechanism variable is insignificant in a certain subsample, it means that
this mechanism does not exist in this subsample. According to the
criteria used to divide the samples in the GPS model, we divided the
samples into low (20–39.1), moderate (39.1–65.5), and high
(65.5–85.3) groups of environmental information disclosure intensity.
Then, the mediating effect models introduced by Baron RM and Kenny
(1986) are used to test the impact mechanisms of these three samples.
Step 1: examining the impact of environmental information disclo­
sure on the public environmental concern:
Yij = α0 + α1 EIDj + Xijτ α + εij (9)
Step 2: testing the impact of environmental information disclosure
on each individual’s environmental risk perception and environ­
mental knowledge:
Perceptionij Knowledgeij = β0 + β1 EIDj + Xijτ β + εij (10)
Step 3: both the environmental information disclosure and each in­
dividual’s environmental risk perception and environmental
knowledge are included in the regression equation:
/
Yij = γ0 + γ 1 EIDj + γ 2 Perceptionij Knowledgeij + Xijτ γ + εij (11)
Where Perceptionij represents the public environmental risk perception,
Knowledgeij represents the knowledge of environmental pollution. The
D. Pan et al.
Table 11
The results of the mediating effects.
Group 1: low environmental information disclosure group
Environmental Risk perception
Concern
Environmental information disclosure 0.025** (0.013) 0.075 (0.041)
Environmental risk perception
Group 2: moderate environmental information disclosure group
Environmental Risk perception
Concern
Environmental information disclosure 0.047*** (0.012) 0.121*** (0.031)
Environmental risk perception
Group 3: high environmental information disclosure group
Environmental Risk perception
Concern
Environmental information disclosure 0.026** (0.012) 0.114 (0.029)
Environmental knowledge
Notes: The robust standard errors are reported in parentheses. ***, ** and * represent the 1%, 5% and 10% significance levels, respectively. The control variables and
city fixed effects were added to the model.
remaining variables are the same as Equation (1).
Table 9 lists the results. We can find that in low environmental in­
formation disclosure group, environmental information disclosure has
no effect on either environmental risk perception or environmental
knowledge, indicating that when the intensity of environmental infor­
mation disclosure is in the lower range, it does not stimulate public
environmental risk perception or increase environmental knowledge. In
moderate environmental information disclosure group, environmental
information disclosure can significantly improve public environmental
risk perception and environmental knowledge, suggesting that when the
environmental information disclosure intensity is in the moderate range,
environmental information disclosure can enhance public environ­
mental concern mainly by increasing each individual’s environmental
risk perception and environmental knowledge. In high environmental
information disclosure group, environmental information disclosure can
significantly improve public environmental knowledge, but has no sig­
nificant effect on environmental risk perception, indicating that when
the intensity of environmental information disclosure is in the higher
range, it no longer stimulates the public risk perception, but still raises
public environmental concern by improving the public environmental
knowledge.
The results in Table 11 prove again why the effect of environmental
information disclosure on public environmental concerns is inverted U-
shaped. When the intensity of environmental information disclosure is
low, environmental information does not raise the public environmental
risk perception and environmental knowledge, thus its impact on public
environmental concern is relatively small. When the intensity of envi­
ronmental information disclosure is moderate, it can improve public
environmental risk perception and environmental knowledge, and the
impact is the greatest. When the intensity of environmental information
disclosure is high, it does not raise public environmental risk perception,
but it can still improve environmental knowledge and thus indirectly
increase public environmental concern, and thus its impact on public
environmental concerns has diminished.
6. Conclusions
Combining CGSS2013 data, a nationally representative sample that
asks questions on a variety of dimensions, with environmental infor­
mation disclosure data at the city level and others, we analyze the
impact of environmental information disclosure on public environ­
mental concern. Our findings strongly support that environmental in­
formation disclosure can obviously stimulate the environmental concern
of residents, and this effect presents an inverted U-shaped curve. As the
intensity of environmental information disclosure increases, the effect of
environmental information disclosure on environmental concerns first
increases and then decreases, but is always positively correlated.
11
Journal of Cleaner Production 379 (2022) 134640
Environmental Environmental knowledge Environmental
Concern Concern
0.005 (0.014) 0.003 (0.058) − 0.010 (0.014)
0.063*** (0.007) 0.043*** (0.007)
Environmental Environmental knowledge Environmental
Concern Concern
0.037*** (0.012) 0.285*** (0.069) 0.034*** (0.012)
0.076*** (0.012) 0.033*** (0.004)
Environmental Environmental knowledge Environmental
Concern Concern
− 0.014 (0.112) 0.209*** (0.063) 0.023* (0.012)
0.044 (0.008) 0.027*** (0.005)
Through the IV method, we found that with a 1% increase for envi­
ronmental information disclosure, the public environmental concern
increased by 1.7%. The research conclusions are continuously valid after
a set of sensitivity tests. The mechanism analysis found that environ­
mental information disclosure enhances public environmental concerns
by improving their environmental risk perception and environmental
knowledge.
According to the previous research conclusions, the following policy
implications are raised. First, the government should further increase
the intensity of environmental information disclosure and comprehen­
sively promote the disclosure of environmental information. It is
necessary to broaden the channels for environmental information
disclosure and expand the scope of pollution source supervision so that
the public can understand more detailed and comprehensive environ­
mental information, which would stimulate their environmental
awareness and encourage them to actively participate in environmental
governance. Second, as the intensity of information disclosure increases,
an inverted U-shaped image appears. It shows that blindly disclosing
environmental information cannot maximize public environmental
concern. The government should formulate a reasonable disclosure plan
to maximize the effect of information.
Our study has the deficiency regarding the data used. There is still a
lot of work to be done in the future. We estimate the effects of envi­
ronmental information disclosure on public environmental concern over
one year of cross-sectional data and the results have a certain reference
value for the policymakers. However, due to the limitation of data
sources, we cannot explore the long-term impact of environmental in­
formation disclosure on public environmental concern through panel
data. This point is a relevant limitation of our research. Perhaps future
researches can explore the long-term effects of environmental infor­
mation disclosure on public environmental concern to gain a more
comprehensive understanding of the effects through panel data.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Dan Pan: Project administration, Conceptualization, Methodology,
Validation, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft, Writing – review &
editing. Wencheng Fan: Software, Data curation, Writing – original
draft. Fanbin Kong: Funding acquisition, Validation, Writing – review
& editing.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
D. Pan et al. Journal of Cleaner Production 379 (2022) 134640

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