Carbon Emissions Trading And Corporate Value ——An Empirical Study Of China’s Carbon Intensive Firms

Climate change is one of the most severe global challenges for mankind in the 21 st century which threatens the survival and development of future generations.In 2016,China became the world’s largest emitter of CO2 emissions and its total carbon dioxide emissions accounted for27.3% of the global total.With the trend of global climate warming and the enormous pressure of the international community,China has incorporated carbon dioxide emission reduction into its general strategy.One of the main source of pollution is industrial carbon dioxide emissions.The government intends to control greenhouse gases through market-incentive environmental policy and in 2011 approved the pilot work of carbon emissions trading in seven provinces.With the development of carbon trading,companies need to invest more capital to purchase environmental protection equipment or develop environmentally friendly products.Meanwhile,market-based environmental regulations can bring more opportunities for environmental friendly enterprise.In view of this,on the basis of relevant theories such as sustainable development theory,Porter effect theory and voluntary information disclosure theory,this paper takes listed companies of carbon-intensive industries in 2010 and 2017 as the samples and explore the impact of carbon trading policies on corporate performance by empirical methods including literature review and double difference method（DID）.What’s more,this paper further analyzed the path between carbon trading policies and corporate performance from technological innovation and information disclosure.This paper also analyzed the heterogeneity of the relationship between them from the nature of property rights.The study found that:（1）Compared with the carbon-intensive listed companies in non-carbon trading pilot provinces,the carbon-intensive listed companies in the pilot provinces have better corporate value.（2）Technological innovation plays a good intermediary role in the relationship of carbon emissions trading policies and corporate value.Although environmental information disclosure can improve corporate value,carbon trading policies do not improve the quality and level of corporate disclosure of environmental information.（3）Due to external pressures and limited resources,carbon trading policies have significantly influence on state-owned enterprises’ value compared to non-state-owned enterprises’ under the same conditions.Otherwise,for the robustness of the results,a series of robustness tests such as the parallel trend hypothesis and placebo test were conducted in this paper.This article enriches the theoretical research of carbon emissions trading and corporate value,and attempts to analyze the path between carbon emissions trading and corporate value,based on the corporate-behavior-influence paradigm.This paper could provide some inspiration for further promoting the construction of the national carbon emissions trading system.Finally,based on the research conclusions of this article,relevant suggestions are made from the government level and the enterprise level.