Abstract
As the continuous changes in environmental regulations have a non-negligible impact on the innovation activities of micro subjects, and economic policy uncertainty has become one of the important influencing factors to be considered in the development of enterprises. Therefore, based on the panel data of Chinese high-tech enterprises from 2012–2017, this paper explores the impact of heterogeneous environmental regulations on firms’ green innovation from the perspective of economic policy uncertainty as a moderating variable. The empirical results show that, first, market-incentivized environmental regulation instruments have an inverted U-shaped relationship with innovation output, while voluntary environmental regulation produces a significant positive impact. Second, the U-shaped relationship between market-based environmental regulation and innovation output becomes more pronounced when economic policy uncertainty is high. However, it plays a negative moderating role in regulating the relationship between voluntary-based environmental regulation and innovation output. This paper not only illustrates the process of technological innovation by revealing the intrinsic mechanism of environmental regulation on firm innovation, but also provides insights for government in environmental governance from the perspective of economic policy uncertainty as well.
Highlights
Accepted: 7 September 2021In recent years, as China’s economic construction has entered a stage of high-quality development and the construction of ecological civilization has continued to advance, people’s green concept has been continuously enhanced
When studying the influence system of different environmental regulation tools on the green innovation output of enterprises, this paper first analyzes the influence of different types of environmental regulation tools on the enterprise innovation output (GPatentModel 1)
It studies the impact of economic policy uncertainty on corporate green innovation, and further explored the moderating effect of economic policy uncertainty on the relationship between environmental regulation and enterprise innovation activities
Summary
As China’s economic construction has entered a stage of high-quality development and the construction of ecological civilization has continued to advance, people’s green concept has been continuously enhanced. The contributions of this paper are as follows: (1) based on the heterogeneity of environmental regulation tools, the research on the incentive effect of external governance mechanisms on corporate innovation. Since Porter’s hypothesis originates from developed countries and is not fully applicable to Chinese firms, the linear results will be discussed here along with the nonlinear results; (2) Explore the moderating effects of economic policy uncertainty on different types of environmental regulatory tools on corporate innovation investment. This paper studies the independent effect of economic policy fluctuations on innovation output, and multiplies the independent variables with the moderating variables to determine whether economic policy uncertainty has a moderating effect in the process of environmental regulation and innovation It is helpful for the government and enterprises to realize greater incentive effect of environmental regulation tools on enterprise innovation in the uncertain environment
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