Non-state-owned Shareholders Governance And Energy Conservation And Emission Reduction In State-owned Enterprises

Promoting energy conservation and emission reduction in enterprises is an important micro mechanism to achieve the national goal of "double carbon",and integrating SOE governance reform with energy conservation and emission reduction is a very important initiative of China’s economic reform,but it is still unclear whether and how SOE governance reform in China affects energy conservation and emission reduction in enterprises.Given the importance of this issue,this paper adopts a textual analysis to define the energy conservation and emission reduction efforts of SOEs,and empirically examines the deterministic role of nonstate shareholder participation in corporate governance on energy conservation and emission reduction in SOEs and the mechanism of the effect,taking China’s heavily polluting A-share listed SOEs from 2011 to 2019 as the research sample.This study not only has important practical implications for improving SOE reform in China and promoting energy efficiency and emission reduction in SOEs,but also plays an important role in enriching the theoretical literature on the economic consequences of SOE reform and the determinants of energy efficiency and emission reduction in SOEs.The study found that:(1)the participation of directors appointed by non-state shareholders in the governance of SOEs can promote energy conservation and emission reduction in SOEs,and this finding still holds after using the instrumental variables approach to deal with endogeneity issues and a series of robustness tests;(2)The cross-sectional test results show that the promotion of non-state shareholder governance of energy conservation and emission reduction by SOEs is more significant when the SOEs are located in areas with more transparent environmental information and higher pollution levels.This suggests that better environmental information disclosure by the government helps to stimulate firms to actively take responsibility for energy conservation and emission reduction,and that firms feel greater environmental pressure to implement energy conservation and emission reduction when the region is highly polluted.In addition,this paper finds that the participation of non-state shareholders in corporate governance contributes more to the energy conservation efforts of SOEs;(3)The results of the mechanism test indicate that non-state shareholder-appointed directors promote energy conservation and emission reduction in SOEs by alleviating corporate agency problems,enhancing their ability to innovate in green technologies and by increasing their investment in environmental protection;(4)The economic motivation analysis shows that the energy saving and emission reduction effect of non-state shareholder governance is economically incentivized by government subsidies and credit support.This study shows that insisting on mixedownership reform of SOEs and safeguarding the governance rights of non-state shareholders can help promote energy conservation and emission reduction in SOEs,thereby achieving the "double carbon" goal and reconciling environmental protection with economic growth.