Cross-regional Radiation Effect of Environmental Protection Interview on Enterprises’ Green Innovation

Abstract

The implementation of the environmental protection interview policy effectively drives the environmental governance behavior of the local governments interviewed. Whether the environmental protection interview policy can cross the administrative divisions and have an impact on the green innovation of enterprises in the neighboring areas of the government to be interviewed is worthy of further discussion. Based on the social interaction theory and the yardstick competition theory, this paper matches the environmental protection interview data of prefecture-level cities and the green patent data of manufacturing listed companies, and takes the promulgation and implementation of the Interim Measures for Interview of Ministry of Environmental Protection in 2014 as the starting point to observe the samples for 6 consecutive years, focusing on the cross-regional radiation effect of environmental protection interview policy on enterprises’ green innovation and the effect under the condition of different property rights system and regional environmental protection level. The results show that: Environmental protection interview has a significant cross-regional radiation effect on the green innovation of enterprises. Local government interviews at the municipal level can encourage enterprises in neighboring government areas to carry out green innovation. After further distinguishing the quality of green innovation, we find that this incentive effect mainly affects substantive green innovation, but has no significant impact on strategic green innovation. Moreover, the radiation effect is still significant after excluding the interference of provincial environmental protection policy. The regional environmental protection level has a significant impact on the cross-regional radiation effect. The lower the environmental protection level, the stronger the promotion effect of environmental protection interview on the green innovation of enterprises in the jurisdiction area. In addition, the radiation effect of environmental protection interview follows different property rights system logic: Compared with private enterprises, state-owned enterprises have more “policy response rigidity”, that is to say, environmental protection interview has a more significant cross-regional radiation effect on the green innovation of state-owned enterprises. From the perspective of green innovation, this paper reveals the cross-regional radiation effect of environmental protection interview policy, thus expanding the research boundary of environmental protection interview policy effect. At the same time, the research conclusion of this paper is helpful to deeply understand the key motivation of enterprise green innovation from the perspective of social interaction and yardstick competition, and can provide important enlightenment for the green development of Chinese enterprises.