Centralized Land Supply Policy and Carbon Emissions Reduction of Listed Companies: A Green Back-Pressure Mechanism Under Land Fiscal Constraints

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This paper treats the “Two Centralizations” policy for residential land supply in 22 key cities introduced by China’s Ministry of Natural Resources in 2021 as a quasi-natural experiment. Based on data of A-share non-financial listed companies from 2013 to 2023, we adopt the Difference-in-Differences (DID) method to systematically evaluate the impact of the centralized land supply policy on the carbon emissions of listed companies and its underlying mechanisms. The findings indicate that the centralized land supply policy significantly reduced the carbon emission levels of listed companies in pilot cities. Measured by the logarithm of total carbon emissions, the policy reduced the average logarithm of total carbon emissions for treatment-group firms by approximately 0.152, corresponding to an approximately 14.1% reduction in the level of carbon emissions (1 − exp(−0.152) ≈ 0.141). This effect is larger in cities with high land fiscal dependence, in high-energy-consumption industries, and among state-owned enterprises. Mechanism analysis reveals that land fiscal back-pressure, industrial land structure optimization, and green technology innovation constitute three complementary transmission channels. Heterogeneity analysis further reveals the boundary conditions for the release of policy effects: the coupling effect of land fiscal dependence and property rights nature is the most critical, and the carbon emission reduction effect of state-owned enterprises in cities with high land fiscal dependence is significantly higher than the average. This paper extends the research on factors influencing corporate carbon emissions from the perspective of land supply institutions and provides empirical evidence for the coordinated design of land policy and environmental protection.