Research On Corporate Green Technology Innovation Under Multiple Co-governance Environment System

Since the implementation of the reform and opening-up policy,China’s economy has made remarkable achievements,accompanied by excessive consumption of resources,reduction of biodiversity and serious environmental pollution.The frequent occurrence of environmental accidents and extreme weather remind people that it is urgent to carry out environmental protection and change the growth mode.The 20 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China pointed out that to build China into a great modern socialist country in all aspects and to advance the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation on all fronts through a Chinese path to modernization.The Chinese path to modernization is a kind of modernization in which humanity and nature coexist in harmony.Respecting,adapting to,and protecting nature is essential for building China into a modern socialist country in all respects.Since the 18 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China proposed to “build beautiful China”,ecological conservation has been raised to an unprecedented height.Various innovative environmental protection policies have been introduced one after another.Multiple co-governance environment system(MCES)which is rooted in the institutional design behind these policies has played a pivotal role.MCES is to achieve environmental improvement through the cooperation of the government,firms and public with the goal of long-term and sustainable development of the environment.Green technology innovation(GTI)is the key driving force for high-quality economic development.The report of the 19 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China proposed to "build a market-oriented GTI system".The National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Science and Technology issued “Guiding Opinions on Building a Market-Oriented GTI System” in 2019,clarifying the overall requirements,specific measures and time schedule for building a market-oriented GTI system,and issued the Implementation Plan for the Further Improvement of a Market-Oriented Green Technology Innovation System(2023-2025)in 2022,pointing out the key tasks and organizational implementation guidelines at the current stage.In 2021,the State Council issued “Guiding Opinions on Accelerating the Establishment and improvement of the Green Low Carbon Circular Development Economic System”,proposing to establish the green low carbon circular development economic system,strengthen the dominant position of enterprise innovation,and support the market-oriented GTI consortium.Enterprises’ GTI is not only to respond to the government’s call and fulfill their environmental responsibility,but also to achieve "innovation","green" and "sustainable" development.Then,under the MCES,it is of great theoretical and practical significance to discuss how government regulation,public participation and corporate interaction affect the GTI behavior of micro-enterprises from the most important three roles-government,the public and enterprises.Based on the above analysis,this paper mainly discusses the following issues.Firstly,the government plays a leading role in the MCES.From the perspective of government regulation,this paper discusses how environmental information disclosure tools---environmental information disclosure regulation(EIDR)affects enterprise GTI and whether it can play a governance effect with other regulatory forces?Secondly,the public plays a participating role in the MCES.Some scholars have paid attention to the overall effect of the public on the medium and macro level of environmental governance but have not reached a consensus on its effect.The possible reason is that some studies focus on the direct impact of public participation on environmental quality,while ignoring the mechanism of public participation that needs to be achieved through the positive response of the government.Then,can public participation stimulate enterprises to carry out GTI,and how can its mechanism be realized?Thirdly,enterprises play a principal role in the MCES.In 2020,the proportion of green patent applications of heavily polluting enterprises and non-heavily polluting enterprises was 16.54% and 83.64% respectively.Heavy polluting enterprises facing greater compliance pressure and more public supervision are not the main force for green patent application,which indicates that there are other forces besides government environmental supervision and public participation that promote GTI.Corporate interaction is just an important market force.From the perspective of corporate interaction,whether the GTI of industrial peers and regional peers will affect the GTI of focus enterprises? That is,does the GTI have industrial and regional peer effect? Are the two effects achieved by the same mechanism?The main conclusions of this paper are as follows:First,the EIDR can promote enterprises’ GTI.This effect can work together with other external regulatory forces——government pollution regulation,short selling mechanism and media attention.At the same time,the EIDR has a spatial spillover effect——promoting GTI of enterprises in other cities in the same province.The study of the interaction between public participation and corporate interaction shows that both the public participation and the GTI of peer enterprises will not affect the promotion effect of EIDR on GTI,supporting the leading role of the government in environmental governance.Heterogeneity analysis shows that EIDR has a stronger promoting effect on GTI in enterprises with state-owned property rights,bigger size,higher energy consumption industries and heavier pollution industries.The analysis of economic consequences shows that EIDR can improve the value of enterprises by encouraging them to carry out GTI.Secondly,public participation can promote GTI of enterprises by promoting local governments to improve environmental governance intensity.The promotion effect of GTI of public participation only plays a role in enterprises with stronger EIDR or higher GTI ability of the same group of enterprises,indicating that the effectiveness of public participation is affected by other external mechanisms,and the public plays a participatory role rather than a leading role in environmental governance.This association between public participation and GTI is more pronounced for(1)firms located in the province with less financial pressure;(2)firms with bigger size;(3)firms with more media attention and(4)firms with higher energy consumption.Thirdly,GTI has peer effect of the enterprises in the same industry or the same city.That is,the GTI of peer enterprises will promote the GTI of focus enterprise.The industrial peer effect is more significant in cities with stronger EIDR,while public participation has no significant impact on this effect.The mechanism analysis shows that industrial peer effect is formed by information mechanism and competition mechanism,while the regional peer effect is mainly formed by information mechanism.Moreover,External legitimacy pressure will strengthen both industrial peer effect and regional peer effect.The possible contributions of this paper are as follows:Firstly,it extends the research on the impact of government environmental governance on micro-enterprises from the perspective of environmental information disclosure.Different from the existing literature that mainly studies the impact of command control tools and market tools on GTI(Li,2015;Wang and Qi,2016;Zhang et al.,2020;Xu and Cui,2020;Wang et al.,2021;Wang and Wang,2021;Zeng et al.,2022),this paper discusses how EIDR affects GTI of enterprises from the perspective of information disclosure tools.And other external regulatory forces——pollution regulation,short selling mechanism and media attention are included in the analytical framework to examine how these external regulatory forces affect the above effects.It not only expands the relevant research on GTI,but also enriches the research on the microeconomic consequences of government environmental governance.Secondly,it enriches the research on influencing factors of GTI from the perspective of public participation.The existing literature mainly discusses the environmental governance effect of public participation from medium and macro perspectives(Han et al.,2016;Wu et al.,2018;Zhang et al.,2021).This paper focuses on the impact of public participation on corporate environmental behavior and its mechanism at the micro enterprise level,expanding the relevant research on public participation in social governance and GTI.At the same time,this paper demonstrates that public participation in promoting GTI needs to be realized through government power,providing empirical evidence about "public participation role" and "government leading role".It also provides policy reference for realizing environmental governance by combining "top-down" system design with "bottomup" public participation.Finally,we contribute to the literature on peer effect of environmental behavior.Existing research shows that peer effect exists in executive compensation(Bizjak et al.,2008;Zhao,2016),capital structure(Leary and Roberts,2014),dividend policy(Grennan,2018;Adhikari and Agrawa,2018),investment behavior(Shi,2015;Wan et al.,2016),R&D and innovation decisions and advertising expenditure(Hoberg and Phillips,2016;Peng et al.,2020;Wang and Chu,2021).Based on the theory of social interaction,this paper considers the industrial and regional peer group effects of GTI and explores the similarities and differences of the formation mechanisms,which not only enriches the relevant research on peer effects,but also helps to deeply understand the formation mechanism of corporate GTI.