The Level of Regional Economic Development, Green Image, and Enterprise Environmental Protection Investment: Empirical Evidence from China

Table 1

Research variable description.

Type	Name	Code	Connotation
Explained variable	Scale of enterprise environmental protection investment	EI	New investment in environmental protection in that year/average total assets
Explanatory variable	Green image	GIM	1 if ISO14001 certification, 0 otherwise
	Regional economic development level	EDL	GDP per capita
Control variable	Corporate profitability	EPS	Earnings per share
	Corporate debt level	LEV	Asset-liability ratio
	Operating cash flow	FLOW	Ratio of net operating cash flow to average total assets
	Cash holding	CASH	Ratio of year-end monetary funds to average total assets
	Opportunity cost	OPP	Tobin’ Q
	Enterprise size	SIZE	Natural logarithm of the total assets of the listed enterprise at the end of the period
	Equity checks and balances	BALANCE	Shareholding ratio of the second largest shareholder to the fifth largest shareholder
	Agency cost	COST	Management expense ratio = management expense/operating income
	Annual dummy variable	YEAR	Take 8 dummy variables in 9 years