Air Pollution And Corporate Green Innovation

In 2013,the PM2.5 concentration in many cities across the country frequently "exploded",and the air pollution situation is severe,which has a major impact on social production,transportation,and residents’ health,which has attracted great attention from the government and people.Green innovation is the fusion point of "innovation-driven" and "green development".It can directly affect pollutant emissions,improve production efficiency,reduce factor input,and is one of the important means to alleviate environmental problems and maintain sustainable development.Investment in environmental protection by enterprises will increase operating costs.At the same time,the long R&D cycle of green innovation activities and the uncertainty of R&D results intensify the risks of green innovation activities and discourage the enthusiasm of enterprises to actively carry out green innovation.However,in order to improve its remediation performance,the government has frequently put pressure on companies.Under government pressure,will increased air pollution encourage companies to carry out green innovation activities? Is the motivation of enterprises for green innovation activities to pursue substantive innovations in technological progress or strategic innovations in pursuit of "quantity" and "speed" in order to cater to government regulation? Are these results different between state-owned enterprises and non-state-owned enterprises? This article will discuss these issues.At present,scholars do not have a unified definition of green innovation.The research on green innovation mainly includes its definition,measurement methods and impact on corporate performance.This article first sorts out the research literature on air pollution and green innovation at home and abroad,and summarizes the research status;then,the article research content involves important terms such as air pollution,green innovation,green patents,heavy pollution industries and related companies,etc.Explain;then,on the basis of the existing literature,combine innovation theory,externality theory and stakeholder theory to propose hypotheses to discuss the impact of air pollution on corporate green innovation.Finally,take my country’s 2014-2018 A-share listed companies in the heavy polluting industry as the research object,measure air pollution by the city’s AQI index,measure green innovation by the amount of corporate green patent applications,set control variables,establish an empirical test model,and study the effects of air pollution The impact of green innovation behavior of A-share listed companies in heavy pollution industries.The study found that air pollution has a promoting effect on the green innovation of enterprises in heavy pollution industries,which is represented by the increase in the total number of green patent applications;specifically distinguishing the nature of patents,air pollution is positively correlated with the number of green utility model patent applications by enterprises,and its green invention patents The number of applications does not matter,indicating that the company is pursuing the "number" of green patent applications by increasing the number of green utility model patent applications,transmitting green innovation signals,and adopting strategic innovation motives;the study of distinguishing the nature of property rights found that air pollution and the green of state-owned enterprises The total number of patent applications and the total number of green utility model patent applications are positively correlated,and not related to the green innovation activities of non-state-owned enterprises.Further research shows that when companies are politically connected,supported by industrial policies,and there are officials in the location where they are promoted,air pollution has a more obvious promotion effect on companies’ green innovation.This paper also uses methods such as replacing explanatory variables and the measurement methods of explained variables to test the robustness of the regression results,and uses the instrumental variable air circulation coefficient to alleviate the endogeneity.The main contributions of this article are as follows: First,this article studies the impact of air pollution on green innovation behavior from the level of heavily polluting industries and enterprises,and enriches the theoretical analysis of air pollution on the innovation behavior of micro-production entities.Second,this article uses the Air Quality Index(AQI)to measure air pollution and the number of green patents applied by the company that year to measure the company’s green innovation.The selection of data is innovative.Third,this article refers to the research of existing scholars,divides the green innovation behavior of enterprises into substantive innovation and strategic innovation according to their innovation motivation,and studies the green innovation motivation of enterprises under the background of increasing air pollution.It is a certain reference to improve the overall green technological innovation capability.