Can The Carbon Emissions Trading Pilot Policy Affect Enterprise Green Innovation

The report of the 20 th National Congress of the CPC clearly pointed out that "Chinese modernization is the modernization of harmony between humanity and nature." As the core driving force and important support for promoting green and low-carbon transformation and achieving high-quality development,green innovation has become an important task for the construction of national ecological civilization.While the high risk and uncertainty of benefits of green innovation will make enterprises more likely to face financing problems when green innovation.As a market-incentivized environmental regulation,the carbon market alleviates the financing problems faced by enterprises by clarifying the market value of carbon assets and prompting enterprises to disclose high-quality environmental information.It has played an important role in promoting enterprise emission reduction and influencing the green and low-carbon transformation of enterprises through financing means.Based on this,this thesis deeply discusses whether the pilot policy of carbon market can affect the green innovation of enterprises from the perspective of financing.In order to explore the impact of carbon market on corporate green innovation,this thesis takes the pilot policy of carbon market as a quasi-natural experiment,uses the data of China’s Ashare listed companies from 2009 to 2019,and uses the multi-period DID method to study the effect and mechanism of carbon market on enterprise green innovation.Specifically,this thesis first analyzes the operation effect and emission reduction effect of the carbon market pilot policy,and verifies the effective implementation of the carbon market pilot policy.Secondly,this thesis explores the impact of the implementation of carbon market pilot policies on enterprises’ green innovation,analyzes the heterogeneity from three levels,and further refines green innovation from two aspects: organizational mode and technical fields,in order to explore the heterogeneity of this impact from multiple perspectives.Finally,this thesis discusses the impact mechanism of carbon market on corporate green innovation from the perspective of financing,especially the intermediary effect of financing constraints and financing costs.The research in this thesis shows: Firstly,carbon market pilot policy significantly promotes green innovation,especially substantive green innovation.After a series of robustness tests,this conclusion still holds.Secondly,the impact of carbon market pilot policy on green innovation has significant enterprise heterogeneity.Compared with state-owned enterprises,high-carbon emission enterprises and large-scale enterprises,carbon market pilot policy has more obvious impact on green innovation and substantive green innovation of non-stateowned enterprises,low-carbon emission enterprises and small-scale enterprises.Thirdly,the promoting effect of carbon market pilot policy on enterprise green innovation is mainly caused by cooperative innovation and low-carbon innovation,and the performance is more obvious in substantive green innovation.Fourthly,financing constraint and debt financing cost play the role of intermediary mechanism,while the intermediary mechanism of equity financing cost does not exist.Therefore,in order to promote green development,we should improve the design and system of relevant environmental policies such as the carbon market,enrichment of carbon financial instruments,alleviate the financing dilemma of green innovation of enterprises,and guide them to green and low-carbon transformation.