The Impact of Natural Resource Accountability Audit for Leading Cadres on Green Productivity: A Sustainability Perspective

This study examines the relationship between the Natural Resource Accountability Audit for Leading Cadres (NRAALC) and green productivity using 104 city-year observations from 13 cities in Hunan Province during 2010–2017. A two-way fixed-effects difference-in-differences model relates staggered audit exposure to a composite index of technological, low-carbon, and digital productive capacity. The baseline coefficient yields a positive point estimate (0.0388; conventional OLS p = 0.0077), which remains positive after adding regional openness. Nevertheless, city-clustered standard-error inference (p = 0.1585) and wild-cluster bootstrap inference (p = 0.1102) fail to reject the null hypothesis of zero policy effect at the 5% significance level. While covariate-adjusted Goodman-Bacon decomposition reproduces the two-way fixed-effects baseline result, the Callaway-Sant’Anna cohort-specific estimator offers no statistically supportive evidence for the policy effect. Although audit exposure correlates positively with the promotion-pressure proxy variable, the full mediation regression and bootstrap confidence interval cannot confirm the indirect transmission mechanism. The positive moderating interaction between audit and officials’ tenure is only statistically meaningful under conventional OLS rather than cluster-robust inference and should be interpreted as suggestive exploratory evidence. This study delivers context-specific correlational evidence regarding ecological accountability and regional green productive capacity; the magnitude and causal attribution of the policy effect remain inconclusive. Empirical conclusions are heavily bounded by the small number of treated cities and scarce post-treatment observations in our provincial sample.