Research On The Influence Mechanism And Economic Consequences Of Digital Economy On Enterprise Environmental Protection Investment

The 18th National Congress of the CPC proposed for the first time to build a "beautiful China",the 19th National Congress of the CPC emphasized the concept of " Lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets",and the 20th National Congress further called for"all-round,regional and whole-process ecological and environmental protection".In recent years,pollution control and environmental protection have become increasingly important,and accelerating green transformation development has become an important strategic plan.As a micro unit of macroeconomic development,enterprises shoulder the dual responsibilities of economic operation and environmental protection.In the financial decision-making of enterprises,environmental protection investment can not only alleviate the negative externalities generated in the production process of enterprises,but also help enterprises establish differentiated competitive advantages,which is an important way to solve the conflict between China’s economic growth and environmental pollution.However,based on the rational economic Man hypothesis and the externality theory,enterprises lack the motivation to actively implement environmental protection investment.Although the intensity of environmental regulation has been enhanced continuously in recent years,there is a contradiction between the"passive" of environmental governance brought by external supervision and the"initiative" of enterprise innovation and development.Therefore,it is urgent to explore the incentive factors for enterprises to invest in environmental protection and fundamentally improve the willingness of enterprises to practice environmental behavior.With the emergence of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence,big data,blockchain and cloud computing,new production modes with data as the core factor of production and digital technology as the driving force have attracted wide attention.Digital economy has also provided a new way of thinking for China’s green development.According to the existing research,digital economy reshapes the relationship between government and market,can optimize the allocation of regional resources,and changes the traditional production model,business process and management model.Therefore,the development of digital economy will have an important impact on the behavior of micro enterprises.Existing studies mainly discuss the environmental investment behavior of enterprises from the perspective of environmental regulation.However,the end-governance environmental regulation policies are difficult to improve the initiative of enterprises’ environmental investment,and the policy incentive regulation tools may lead to the rent-seeking behavior of enterprises.Environmental regulation is difficult to optimize the efficiency of resource allocation in the process of promoting the green transformation and development of enterprises.Digital economy makes it possible for enterprises to achieve a win-win situation of environmental and economic benefits.In view of this,this paper aims to study the following questions:Can the digital economy affect enterprises’environmental investment?What is the impact mechanism of digital economy on enterprises’environmental investment?Under the background of digital economy,what economic consequences will enterprises’ environmental protection investment bring?In order to study the above issues,the following work is carried out in this paper:First,based on the existing researches,the concepts of digital economy and enterprise environmental protection investment are defined,and the economic consequences of digital economy and the influencing factors of environmental protection investment are respectively reviewed,and the potential logical relationship between the two is preliminarily explored.Secondly,based on the principal-agent theory,cost-benefit theory,organizational legitimacy theory,resource-based theory,externality theory,bounded rationality theory,information asymmetry theory,etc.,the theoretical analysis framework of the impact of digital economy on enterprise environmental investment is built.Thirdly,based on the theoretical analysis of the relationship between digital economy and enterprise environmental protection investment,put forward hypothetical propositions on their relationship and related influence mechanism,and study the economic consequences of enterprise environmental protection investment under the background of digital economy from two aspects:the establishment of competitive advantage and the pricing efficiency of capital market.Finally,taking the heavily polluting A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2020 as the research object,this paper empirically tests the relationship between digital economy and enterprise environmental protection investment,as well as the effectiveness of relevant influencing mechanisms and economic consequences.The main research conclusions are as follows.First,the digital economy can significantly improve enterprises’ environmental protection investment,and this conclusion remains valid after a series of robustness tests.Further research shows that the promotion effect of digital economy on enterprises’ investment in environmental protection will be affected by regulatory environment and information environment.When the environmental regulation intensity of the region where enterprises are located is weak,and enterprises receive less attention from media and analysts,digital economy can promote enterprises’ investment behavior in environmental protection more.By dividing the environmental protection investment into capitalization and expensing,it is found that the digital economy mainly enhances the capitalization expenditure of the enterprise’s environmental protection investment,but the promotion effect on the expensing expenditure is not obvious.Second,by examining the influence mechanism of digital economy and enterprise environmental protection investment,it is found that digital economy can significantly improve the internal governance level of enterprises,alleviate the financing constraints of enterprises,and then promote environmental protection investment,that is,internal governance and financing constraints are the intermediary mechanism of digital economy affecting enterprise environmental protection investment.The external regulatory intensity did not play an intermediary role.This conclusion indicates that under the background of digital economy,enterprises’ environmental investment behaviors are more proactive,while the effect of enhancing external supervision to force enterprises to passively fulfill environmental responsibilities is not obvious.Thirdly,in view of the purpose of enterprises’ environmental protection investment to establish technological advantages and gain recognition from stakeholders,this paper further tests the economic consequences of enterprises’ environmental protection investment under the background of digital economy from two aspects:green innovation and asset pricing efficiency.It is found that environmental protection investment can significantly improve the level of green innovation of enterprises,and digital economy can further strengthen the role of environmental protection investment in promoting green innovation.At the same time,there is a significant positive correlation between environmental protection investment and mispricing of corporate assets,that is,environmental protection investment will exacerbate the deviation between corporate stock price and real value,and reduce the efficiency of asset pricing.The digital economy can alleviate the negative impact of environmental investment on the mispricing of corporate assets.It shows that digital economy can bring more positive economic consequences for environmental protection investment,which can strengthen the green innovation level of enterprises,but also optimize the efficiency of market resource allocation.The theoretical contributions of this paper mainly include the following two points:on the one hand,based on China’s institutional background,from the perspective of green development to expand the microeconomic consequences of digital economy.Existing researches on digital economy mainly focus on the macro level,such as the impact on industrial transformation and economic development quality,while a few researches on micro enterprises mainly focus on internal control,enterprise value and total factor productivity.Based on enterprises’ investment in environmental protection,this paper further extends the micro consequences of digital economy from the perspective of enterprises’ environmental governance.At the same time,based on the research on the relationship between digital economy and enterprise environmental protection investment,this paper further extends the economic consequences to green innovation and capital market pricing efficiency based on China’s institutional background,which is helpful to expand the digital economy on the green development strategy and capital market allocation efficiency related research.On the other hand,from the perspective of information economics,it enriches the research of influencing factors of enterprise environmental investment.Existing researches mainly start from the perspective of institutional economics to explore the impact of environmental regulation on enterprises’ environmental investment behavior.This paper takes digital economy as the entry point and further expands the research scope and theoretical boundary of enterprises’ environmental investment mainly from the perspective of information economics.This paper aims to provide policy basis for government departments to increase the construction of digital economy infrastructure and improve the efficiency of environmental governance,and at the same time provide decision-making reference for enterprises to use digital technology to enable green transformation.