Do government subsidies improve innovation investment for new energy firms: A quasi-natural experiment of China's listed companies

Abstract

This paper applies the fixed effects and the difference-in-differences models to explore the impact of government subsidies on the innovation investment of new energy firms by the financial information of China's listed companies from 2007 to 2017. The empirical results demonstrate that the subsidy scale of new energy enterprises has an inverted U-shaped relationship with enterprise innovation investment. The higher subsidy level has a crowding out effect on the research and development (R&D) investment of enterprises, which is largely attributable to the managerial myopia of enterprises. We further confirm the existence of the crowding out effect by exploring the quasi-natural experiment of China's new energy vehicle subsidy adjustment policy in 2016. We find that reducing subsidies is associated with a significant increase in R&D investment. This study reveals the optimal choice of government intervention.