Research On The Impact Of Environmental Regulation Policies On The R&D Behavior Of Enterprise

Since the reform and opening up,China’s pursuit of economic benefits as the focus of development has ignored the negative impact of unreasonable development methods on the ecological environment to a certain extent.Under such circumstances,Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilization came into being.In order to strengthen the awareness of environmental protection at all levels and effectively promote the orderly development of the battle against environmental protection,the central government has continuously introduced and implemented new environmental regulation policies.Among them,the "Environmental Protection Law of the People’s Republic of China"(New Environmental Protection Law),which was implemented on January 1,2015,highlighted the important position of ecological civilization construction in my country for the first time from a legal point of view,provided a strong guarantee for my country’s environmental protection.However,as a specific environmental regulation policy,whether the new environmental protection law can effectively coordinate the relationship between environmental protection and enterprise R&D innovation is still inconclusive.Therefore,whether the implementation of the new law will help improve the level of R&D investment of enterprises will become the focus of this paper.In the theoretical analysis part,the related concepts such as environmental regulation and R&D innovation are firstly summarized to clarify the research object of this paper.Then,on the basis of systematically sorting out the literature on the relationship between environmental regulation and enterprise innovation and its impact mechanism,we briefly review the existing research results.Secondly,the classical theory related to the research content of this paper is introduced,which provides theoretical support for the following research design.Then,we analyze the mechanism of the implementation of the new environmental protection law on the R&D investment of enterprises,the impact mechanism of enterprise heterogeneity on the policy effect,the mechanism that government subsidies play a moderating role between environmental regulation and enterprise R&D investment,and the mediating role of environmental protection investment.mechanism,and put forward six corresponding hypotheses.Finally,we developed a research design based on theoretical analysis.In the empirical test part,based on the data of 1,965 listed companies from 2010 to 2020,we empirically test the impact of the implementation of the new environmental protection law on the R&D investment of enterprises by using the double-difference(DID)model.And then,we use dynamic effect test,PSM-DID method,methods such as changing the policy window period,placebo test,and sample regrouping to verify the robustness of conclusion.The results show that the impact of the implementation of the new environmental protection law on corporate R&D investment is generally a crowding-out effect,and the robustness test results support this conclusion.Then,we examine the effect of environmental regulation policies on different enterprises from three aspects:the region,the nature of property rights,and financing constraints.Based on the analysis of regional heterogeneity,we find that the crowding-out effect of the implementation of the new environmental protection law on the R&D investment of enterprises is the most obvious in the economically underdeveloped regions,followed bythe economically developed regions,and the effect is not obvious in the economicallyunderdeveloped regions.Based on the heterogeneity analysis of property rights,we find that the implementation of the new environmental protection law has a crowding-out effect on the R&D investment of both state-owned enterprises and non-state-owned enterprises,and the crowding-out effect of non-state-owned enterprises is obviously stronger than that of state-owned enterprises.Based on the analysis of the heterogeneity of corporate financing constraints,we find that the implementation of the new law has a stronger crowding-out effect on companies with heavier financing constraints.Finally,in further analysis,we find that government subsidies will strengthen the crowding-out effect of environmental regulation policies on state-owned enterprises’ R&D investment,while weakening the crowding-out effect of policies on non-state-owned enterprises.In addition,environmental protection investment plays a partial mediating effect between environmental regulation policies and corporate R&D investment.