How Does the Implementation of the New Environmental Protection Law Affect the Stock Price of Heavily Polluting Enterprises? Evidence from China's Capital Market

This paper puts forward "attention hypothesis" and "information revelation hypothesis" in terms of the strong market response to the implementation of the updated China Environmental Protection Law (hereinafter referred to as "the new EPL") in 2015, which verifies the effectiveness of China's capital market in identifying dynamic changes of company fundamental information by selecting listed heavily polluting enterprises in China as research samples. The "attention hypothesis" interprets the slump in stock due to investors' attention attracted by media coverage about implementation of "the new EPL", while the "information revelation hypothesis" focuses on the investors' information acquisition during the hiatus from promulgation to implementation of "the new EPL". This paper is of great significance to help understand the behavioral characteristics, decision-making process and influencing mechanism of investors.