Environmental Policy Sequencing for Sustainability: Mandatory Regulation and Multidimensional Corporate Disclosure in China

Environmental policy evaluation for sustainability requires attention not only to the effects of individual instruments but also to how prior policy exposure shapes corporate responses to subsequent regulation. Using China’s revised Environmental Protection Law as the institutional setting, this study examines whether firms facing historically greater regulatory exposure experienced differential post-2015 changes in corporate environmental disclosure and whether pre-policy environmental subsidy exposure is associated with the magnitude of those responses. Corporate disclosure is conceptualized as a multidimensional policy response comprising aggregate disclosure-based transparency, outcome-oriented content, process-oriented content, and structural balance. Using Chinese A-share listed firms from 2008 to 2023, the analysis combines entropy balancing with a difference-in-differences design and industry-level inference. Historically, pollution-intensive firms exhibit a larger post-2015 increase in aggregate disclosure-based transparency than comparison firms (β = 0.2221), wild-bootstrap (p = 0.0005). Both outcome- and process-oriented disclosure increase, with a significantly larger response in outcome-oriented content, whereas content imbalance does not decline significantly. Greater pre-policy subsidy exposure is associated with a smaller incremental response (β = −0.0542), wild-bootstrap (p = 0.0238), although this relationship is distributionally sensitive and noncausal. The findings indicate that corporate responses to mandatory regulation are multidimensional and may vary with prior policy exposure, highlighting the relevance of policy sequencing to sustainability governance. Because later environmental policies overlap with the post-2015 period, the estimates reflect differential responses to the broader regulatory environment rather than the isolated effect of a single law. The disclosure measures capture reported information rather than verified environmental performance.