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Using 522 nonfinancial listed companies on the Chinese A-share Market during 2008–2016 as the sample, this paper studies the discretion of corporations to fulfill their environmental responsibilities in the face of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) through a panel regression model and a panel quantile regression model. Additionally, the sample is classified and the heterogeneity is analyzed based on the equity nature, the financing constraints and the economic region in which the corporations are located. The conclusions are as follows. First, faced with EPU, the corporations are willing to actively undertake environmental responsibilities, but their marginal propensity to these responsibilities shows a downward trend. Second, under the premise of EPU, the decision-making behavior of different types of corporations to fulfill their environmental responsibilities is heterogeneous, which is embodied in the equity nature, financing constraints and economic region. Third, through the stepwise regression method, this paper further studies the impact mechanism, and finds that the enterprise’s leverage ratio plays a partial mediating role in the relationship between EPU and environmental responsibility of nonfinancial corporations. Our paper provides important policy implications for the government. In the process of requiring corporations to fulfill their environmental responsibilities, relevant government organizations should fully consider the impact of EPU on the corporations’ development, and the level of environmental responsibilities should be controlled based on the type of the corporation. We further suggest that the requirement should be imposed on the corporations to disclose high-quality and reliable environmental protection information. Finally, we recommend that the corporations should adhere to the route of sustainable development.

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<abstract> <p>Based on mathematical models, in-depth analysis about the interrelationship between agricultural CO₂ emission and economic development has increasingly become a hotly debated topic. By applying two mathematical models including logarithmic mean divisia index (LMDI) and Tapio decoupling, this work aims to study the driving factor and decoupling trend for Chinese agricultural CO₂ emission from 1996 to 2020. Firstly, the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) method is selected to estimate the agricultural CO₂ emission from 1996 to 2020, and the LMDI model is adopted to decompose the driving factors of agricultural CO₂ emission into four agricultural factors including economic development, carbon emission intensity, structure, and labor effect. Then, the Tapio decoupling model is applied to analyze the decoupling state and development trend between the development of agricultural economy and CO₂ emission. Finally, this paper puts forward some policies to formulate a feasible agricultural CO₂ emission reduction strategy. The main research conclusions are summarized as follows: 1) During the period from 1996 to 2020, China's agricultural CO₂ emission showed two stages, a rapid growth stage (1996–2015) and a rapid decline stage (2016–2020). 2) Agricultural economic development is the first driving factor for the increase of agricultural CO₂ emission, while agricultural labor factor and agricultural production efficiency factor play two key inhibitory roles. 3) From 1996 to 2020, on the whole, China's agricultural sector CO₂ emission and economic development showed a weak decoupling (WD) state. The decoupling states corresponding to each time period are strong negative decoupling (SND) (1996–2000), expansive negative decoupling (END) (2001–2005), WD (2006–2015) and strong decoupling (SD) (2016–2020), respectively.</p> </abstract>

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