This paper investigates how environmental regulation and action affect analyst behaviour. Exploiting staggered enactment of low carbon city (LCC) initiatives in a difference-in-differences (DiD) setting, we observe that analyst forecast accuracy (dispersion) is significantly lower (greater) for client firms headquartered in cities covered by the LCC pilot programme, especially among firms with a low-quality information environment. The LCC effort affects analyst behaviour via increased firm risk and reduced earnings predictability, causing enhanced site visits and coverage. The results are stronger in cities with more rigorous enforcement and regulation intensity, for private firms with high business complexity and in heavily polluting industries. Results are robust to DiD models with entropy balancing matching, placebo tests, parallel trend tests, and a battery of fixed effects. Collectively, they reveal that environmental regulation has real impacts on analyst forecast behaviour.

This study contributes to the low-carbon city (LCC) related literature by providing causal evidence on the impact of carbon reduction regulation on firm risk. Using staggered adoption of LCC program shocks in China as a quasi-natural experiment, we implement a difference-in-differences (DiD) analysis to investigate the impact of the low-carbon city initiatives on firm risk. We find that low-carbon city initiatives are significantly correlated with firm total risk, systematic risk, and idiosyncratic risk. The results are more pronounced for firms with greater changes of investment in fixed assets and R&D and for firms in provinces with stronger legal enforcement. Our study provides in-depth insights into the low-carbon city initiatives and the firm-level impact of its implementation.