Abstract: Green development is an important part of high-quality development. Based on the exogenous impact of incorporating environmental performance into the official performance appraisal, this paper has manually collected and sorted out the index data of environmental target constraint disclosed in the government work reports of 285 cities. On this basis, it further conducts a cross-database matching between China Industrial Enterprise Pollution Discharge Database and China Industrial Enterprise Database from 1998 to 2012, so as to obtain comprehensive data of enterprises and local governments’ environmental protection indicators. Then it adopts the DID method to test the impact of local governments’ environmental target constraints on the pollution emissions of enterprises located in the areas under administration. The findings show that the autonomous restraint behavior of local governments under the green performance evaluation system has effectively promoted the pollution reduction of enterprises and reduced the chemical oxygen demand emissions of enterprises by 9.0%. Local governments have effectively promoted environment governance in their jurisdictions through environmental regulation and environmental protection subsidies, and enterprises have achieved emission reduction and pollution control mainly through source control and technical effects. The results of heterogeneity analysis show that the enterprises in the eastern region or with heavy pollution have achieved more pollution reduction. In addition, officials promoted locally have achieved more significant environmental governance due to their geographical advantages, and young officials have greatly reduced the pollution emissions of enterprises in their jurisdictions under the strong incentive of promotion.

Key words: environmental target constraints, green performance evaluation, pollution reduction, DID Method