Abstract: The construction of the environmental rule of law is a crucial initiative for advancing ecological civilization through the application of green justice principles. This study employs the establishment of environmental courts as a quasi-natural experiment to investigate the impact of strengthening environmental rule of law on stock price crash risk with the data from A-share listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges from 2007 to 2022. The findings indicate that the establishment of environmental courts can mitigate the risk of stock price crashes. The mechanism analysis reveals that the establishment of environmental courts can not only strengthen the supervision of judicial institutions, media and the public on the corporate environment, accelerating the release of negative information on the corporate environment, but also enhance the supervision of shareholders on the corporate environment, reducing the hidden environmental negative information of enterprises. Therefore, the establishment of environmental courts can reduce the risk of stock price collapse. Further analysis indicates that when environmental legislation is better, environmental law enforcement is looser, market information environment is poorer, and corporate governance level is lower, the establishment of environmental courts has a more significant effect on reducing the risk of stock price collapse. The expansion analysis reveals that the establishment of environmental courts can reduce stock price synchronicity and improve stock pricing efficiency. To this end, it is necessary to vigorously build environmental courts and handle their relationship with environmental legislation, environmental law enforcement, market information environment, and corporate governance level.

Key words: environmental courts, stock price crash risk, negative environmental information, stock price synchronization, stock pricing efficiency