Abstract
In the construction of ecological civilization, green innovation has become an important driving force for the sustainable development of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). This paper uses panel data of state-owned listed enterprises from 2008 to 2019 to explore mixed-ownership reform’s influence on the green transformation of SOEs and its specific mechanisms. The results show that the diversity of mixed shareholders, the depth of mixed equity, and the restriction of mixed equity significantly promote the SOEs’ green innovation. Moreover, there are distinctions in the impact of the shareholding ratio of heterogeneous shareholders on green innovation. Only the increase in the shareholding ratio of foreign shareholders has a positive correlation with green innovation. The mechanism tests indicate that the mixed-ownership reform plays a governance role in the green transformation of SOEs by optimizing the reasonable allocation of environmental protection subsidies and propelling environmental social responsibility’s active performance. Our study further subdivides the significant promotion effect of mixed-ownership reform on green innovation, finding that it only exists in the SOEs in heavily polluting industries and regions with a high degree of marketization. Finally, we find that the ownership structure adjustment caused by the mixed-ownership reform has improved SOEs’ environmental management system and facilitated its sustainable development capabilities.
Highlights
With the economic development entering the new normal, the current extent of resource consumption and environmental damage is approaching the ecological environment’s upper limit
The average numbers of green invention patent applications (AGIP) and green utility model patent applications (AGUP) are 0.213 and 0.161, respectively, which are lower than those of Xu and Cui [50], taking all listed companies as samples by similarity measure. This shows that compared with private enterprises, the green patent applications of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are at a low level, lacking the motivation and resources for green transformation, and the standard deviation is larger than the mean value, which indicates that there is a great discrepancy in the strength of green innovation among SOEs
Column 1 demonstrates that the regression coefficient of the diversity of mixed shareholders (MIXS) and green patent applications (AGP) is 0.307, which is significantly positively correlated at the 1% level, indicating that the green innovation output level of SOEs is enhanced with the increase in heterogeneous shareholder diversity
Summary
With the economic development entering the new normal, the current extent of resource consumption and environmental damage is approaching the ecological environment’s upper limit. Based on the practice of heterogeneous capital cross-shareholding and mutual restriction to optimize SOEs’ governance mechanism, we explore whether the mixed-ownership reform can propel enterprise green innovation. It reveals the internal logic of the mixed-ownership reform driving the green transformation of SOEs. Under the concern of stakeholders, the fulfillment of environmental responsibility helps to transform scientific practice to the green innovation that protects public health and ecological environment [20]. The results of this paper show that mixed-ownership reform has actively promoted the SOEs’ green transformation, which means that reform has improved the governance mechanisms and operation decisions of companies and resolved the controversy over the effectiveness of SOE reform in China
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