Abstract
This study explores the impact of public concerns on green innovation in China’s automotive industry and examines whether the effect varies based on firm size, ownership, and time phase. The study investigates 151 automobile enterprises and provides a novel, large-scale, and data-based perspective and estimation method for exploring critical factors of green innovation. By applying transition probabilities matrix (TPM) model, this paper finds that for different-sizes automotive enterprises there are significant differences in innovation sustainability, non-innovation sustainability, and liquidity between innovation and non-innovation, and such differences also exist for state-owned and non-state-owned enterprises. Then, based on the dynamic panel random probit (DPRP) model, the paper further analyzes the possible reasons for these differences, and particularly focuses on exploring the impact of public environmental concern on the environmental technology innovation. The empirical results show: 1) public concerns encourages green innovation emerging in all automotive firms, but only affects innovation persistence in medium and large companies. 2) public concerns encourages non-innovator state-owned companies to become innovators and motivates them to maintain continuous innovation. 3) the impact of public concerns changes over time. In the periods of 2002–2007 and 2012–2013, the role of public concerns is not significant. However, in the 2007–2012 period, public concerns significantly stimulate enterprises to move from non-innovators to innovators and promotes continuous innovation.
Highlights
Global warming, which is caused by relentless increases in greenhouse gas, especially CO2 emissions, has become a key challenge for the society worldwide (Liu et al, 2020a)
If the enterprise acts as an innovator in period t−1, receiving public concerns will influence its innovative status in period t; that is, public concerns encourage the company to innovate continuously
This study analyzes the impact of public concerns on green innovation of Chinese automobile companies and examines whether the effect varies depending on enterprise size, ownership, and time phase
Summary
Global warming, which is caused by relentless increases in greenhouse gas, especially CO2 emissions, has become a key challenge for the society worldwide (Liu et al, 2020a). Alongside with the rapid economic growth, China has overtaken the United States as the world’s largest CO2 emitter in around 2007 (Fu et al, 2021); According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), China’s CO2 emissions accounted for 29% of the world’s total in 2019. Energy consumption in the transportation industry has become one of the significant contributor to the rapid increase in China’s CO2 emissions Among the different modes of transportation, road transport is the biggest contributor to CO2 emissions in many countries (Cai et al, 2011; Solaymani, 2019). In China, total carbon emissions from the freight industry increased 25.81 times from 3.7352 Mt in 1988 to 96.4158 Mt in 2016, and the road freight was the sector with the largest increase in carbon emissions, with a 119.38-fold increase (Lv et al, 2019)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
