环保法庭设立能否改善城市内部环境不平等?OA

As a key initiative of environmental judicial reform,the establishment of environmental courts serves as a crucial measure for improving the environmental governance system.However,whether it can concurrently enhance environmental governance efficien-cy and ensure equity has not yet been sufficiently verified.By systematically measuring intra-city environmental inequality using fine-grained gridded air pollution data,this study empirically investigated the impact of the establishment of environmental courts on intra-city environmental inequality and its underlying mechanisms.Based on panel data from 284 Chinese cities between 2005 and 2023,this analysis comprehensively employed the difference-in-differences(DID)method alongside various machine learning-based causal in-ference approaches.The findings revealed that:① The establishment of environmental courts significantly mitigated intra-city environ-mental inequality.This conclusion remained robust after accounting for a variety of potential robustness concerns,including heteroge-neous treatment effects,sample matching bias,and the sensitivity to machine learning algorithms.② Mechanism analysis demonstrated that deterring corporate polluting behaviors and curbing the entry of polluting enterprises were the primary pathways through which en-vironmental courts alleviated intra-city environmental inequality.These pathways were mainly manifested in the escalation of corporate environmental compliance risks and a decline in the entry rate of pollution-intensive enterprises.Heterogeneity tests showed that this mitigating effect was more pronounced in cities with higher local government attention to green development,stronger public environ-mental awareness,and in cities located in the central and western regions.③ Based on the market equilibrium treatment effect frame-work,this study conducted a policy optimization analysis.The results indicated that the actual implementation of the policy establishing environmental courts fell short of the optimal execution rules required to maximize environmental welfare performance,leaving substan-tial room for policy optimization in enhancing such performance.These findings not only elucidate the underlying logic by which envi-ronmental judicial reform ameliorates environmental inequality but also provide theoretical insights and policy implications for the fur-ther expansion of environmental courts.Accordingly,this study proposes the following recommendations:improve the environmental court system to enhance environmental judicial efficacy;facilitate policy transmission mechanisms to strengthen governance synergies;implement differentiated policy layouts to precisely match regional demands;and focus on environmental welfare performance to opti-mize policy promotion pathways.