Research On The Influence Of Environmental Regulation On Technological Innovation Of Enterprises In Six Central Provinces

Since the reform and opening up,China’s economy has made great progress and its productivity has been increased rapidly.However,the excessive consumption of energy and the serious deterioration of environment in the process of rapid growth have become the bottleneck restricting economic development.Then our country has put forward the request of the high quality development,which proves that our economy has changed from the high speed growth period to the high quality development period.At the same time,in recent years,there have been frequent technical blockades in the world.The problem of "choke" has become an important factor restricting our economic development.The Made in China2025 National action Plan points out that we should adhere to the basic principle of "innovation-driven",encourage enterprises to take an innovation-driven development path,and actively carry out technological innovation.As one of the four plates,the six provinces in central China are taking a road of industrialization from large agricultural industry structure to large industrial structure and from agricultural province to industrial province.Most of their industries are energy-consuming and high-pollution industries,which results in excessive resource consumption and intensified environmental pollution in the central region.The central region has the greatest potential to expand domestic demand and enhance the level of opening up,which has important strategic significance in the country’s regional development pattern.Therefore,how to realize the effective balance between environmental governance and technological innovation in the six central provinces is a big problem for our country to realize high-quality economic development and sustainable development.This paper reviews the theories and literature of environmental regulation and enterprise technological innovation,and summarizes the main views and conclusions.On this basis,taking 42 listed companies in six central provinces from 2016 to 2021 as research samples,and on the basis of analyzing the influence mechanism of environmental regulation on enterprise technological innovation,a panel regression model of environmental regulation on enterprise technological innovation is constructed.At the same time,the intermediary variable of executive compensation is included in the framework of the influence mechanism of environmental regulation and enterprise technological innovation,and the intermediary effect model is used to explore the role of executive compensation between the two.Further,based on the whole sample,the heterogeneity analysis is carried out according to the equity nature and regional distribution of enterprises,the regression results and reasons are summarized,and the corresponding suggestions are given.The results show that:(1)Environmental regulation has a significant inhibitory effect on technological innovation of enterprises in the six central provinces,which is mainly caused by cost squeeze;In addition,technological innovation itself has the characteristics of high risk,enterprises dare not rush to carry out technological innovation.(2)Among the control variables,asset-liability ratio and profit rate on total assets both play a positive role in promoting enterprise technological innovation,while the shareholding ratio of the largest shareholder plays a negative role in inhibiting enterprise technological innovation.(3)After the variable of executive compensation is added,the inhibition effect of environmental regulations on corporate technological innovation decreases,but the significance level does not change significantly,which indicates that environmental regulations can not only directly inhibit corporate technological innovation,but also alleviate this inhibition effect by exerting pressure on executives in terms of compensation to stimulate their innovation consciousness.(4)From the perspective of equity heterogeneity,there are certain differences in the impact of environmental regulations on technological innovation of enterprises.Compared with non-state-owned enterprises,environmental regulations have a greater inhibitory effect on state-owned enterprises.(5)From the perspective of regional heterogeneity,environmental regulation has an inhibitory effect on technological innovation of enterprises in both northern and southern provinces,but it has a greater inhibitory effect on technological innovation level of enterprises in northern provinces.The results show that environmental regulation should be strengthened appropriately in northern provinces to avoid them becoming "pollution sanctuaries".