Examining the impact of environment regulatory and resource endowment on technology innovation efficiency: From the microdata of Chinese renewable energy enterprises

Abstract

Under the constraint of “double carbon” goal, both environmental regulation and resource endowment are important factors affecting the technological innovation efficiency. Based on the panel data of Chinese renewable energy enterprises from 2010 to 2019, this paper uses fixed effect and sys-GMM model to investigate the moderating effect of resource endowment between environmental regulation and technological innovation efficiency. The results show that the economical and supervised environment regulation are positively correlated with technological innovation efficiency, while the legal environmental regulation is the opposite. Moreover, resource endowment is positively related to technological innovation efficiency, especially for non-state-owned renewable energy enterprises, which reflects the existence of a certain degree of “resource curse” in state-owned renewable energy enterprises. In addition, resource endowment has a significant negative moderating effect in the relationship between environmental regulation and technological innovation efficiency, which shows that with the increase of resource endowment, the impact of economical and supervised environmental regulation on technological innovation efficiency will weaken, while the impact of legal environmental regulation on technological innovation efficiency will strengthen. It is helpful for the government to formulate more accurate resource and environmental regulation policies to improve the technological innovation efficiency.