Environmental Regulation And Enterprise R&D Investment

After 40 years of rapid development,China has achieved world-renowned industrialization development results.However,the extensive development mode with high investment,high energy consumption and high emissions has caused serious environmental problems.Today,increasingly serious environmental pollution problems have affected the sustainable development of our economy.In fact,environmental pollution is a common challenge facing countries around the world.In this context,more and more scholars and government departments have realized the importance of corporate R&D investment.Existing research shows that a company's R&D capabilities depend on "policy-driven".The Porter hypothesis theory believes that designing reasonable environmental regulations is conducive to promoting innovative activities.However,the academic community has not yet reached a consensus on the relationship between environmental regulation and corporate R&D investment.The controversy is reflected in two points: First,whether environmental regulation can promote enterprises to increase research and development investment.Second,whether the impact of environmental regulations on R&D investment is linear or non-linear.These disputes are not conducive to the formulation of correct environmental policies by government departments.Based on this,this articlestudies the impact of environmental regulations on corporate R&D investment,helps to find and explore an economic development model that coordinates economic development and environmental protection,and has important practical significance for promoting China's economy to achieve green sustainable development.The thesis mainly derives and tests the main hypotheses proposed from the theoretical model and the empirical test,and provides a scientific basis for the properly designed environmental regulations to drive the increase in R&D investment of enterprises.In the theoretical model section,the paper draws on the analysis framework of Selden and Song(1995)and Zhang Cheng et al.(2011)to discuss how environmental regulations affect the decision-making of R&D investment of enterprises.The conclusion of the theoretical model shows that there is a "U" relationship between environmental regulations and enterprise R&D investment,that is,if the government implements reasonable environmental regulations,it will be beneficial for enterprises to increase investment in R&D.In the empirical test,the paper first calculates the industry-level environmental regulation strength based on the pollution emission data of the China Environmental Statistics Annual Report,calculates the micro-level enterprise R&D investment and control variables according to the China Industrial Enterprise Database,and then measures the industry-level environment The regulatory intensity is matched to the micro-enterprise data,and then the empirical test of theimpact of environmental regulations on corporate R&D investment is conducted from two aspects,overall and heterogeneous.The research results show that,on the whole,there is a U-shaped relationship between environmental regulations and enterprise R&D investment,that is,when the intensity of environmental regulations is low,the environmental costs faced by enterprises are low,so the willingness of enterprises to increase R&D investment is relatively low;When the environmental regulations exceed a certain intensity,the increase in environmental costs and the government's high-pressure policies will force companies to increase investment in research and development.Further,after considering the heterogeneity of the enterprise,we found that:(1)After dividing the sample according to the region where the enterprise is located and the state of exports,environmental regulations and enterprise R&D investment still have a U-shaped relationship.(2)After the samples are divided according to the pollution types of enterprises,the impact of environmental regulations on R&D investment of heavily and moderately polluting enterprises is U-shaped,but for lightly polluting enterprises,there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between the two.Therefore,local governments should formulate reasonable environmental policies,while protecting the environment,encourage enterprises to increase investment in research and development,promote technological upgrading,and achieve cleaner production.