From the perspective of top managers’behavoir, this paper investigates the impacts of local air pollution on a firm’s stock price crash risk. To establish causality, we introduce an exogenous shock of spatial changes for air pollution and conduct spatial regression discontinuity design across the Qinling-Huai River boundary in China. The results show that air pollution has a significant positive effect on a firm’s stock price crash risk. A plausible mechanism behind the effect is that worsened air conditions increase management turnover, leading to the disclosure of accumulated bad information. In addition, firms located in polluted areas have a higher rate of managers leaving due to health reasons than those in less polluted areas. The effects of air pollution on stock price crash risk are more pronounced in firms with lower level of managers’ salary, firms located in areas with less medical resources, firms with poorer information disclosure quality and non-state-owned firms. This study adds empirical evidence on how external environment affects financial market through the behavior of firms’ managers, and provides policy implications regarding the importance of improving local environmental regulation enforcement and financial market development.