Frontiers in Environmental Science (Jul 2022)
Research of the Impact of Heterogeneous Environmental Regulation on the Performance of China’s Manufacturing Enterprises
Abstract
Promoting high-quality economic development with high-level ecological protection is one of the most important tasks in China’s new stage of development. The improvement of enterprise performance is the micro-foundation of high-quality economic development, while environmental regulations aim to reduce the negative effect of economic development on the environment. Consequently, the microeconomic effects of environmental regulation have received widespread attention in academia. Previous studies have emphasized the effect of environmental regulations on firm performance but have not reached a consensus and lack of insight on the combined effects of different types of environmental regulation. This study aims to fill this gap by considering the heterogeneity of environmental regulations and the effect of the interaction between heterogeneous environmental regulations on enterprise performance. To reveal the relationship between the different types of environmental regulations and the performance of manufacturing enterprises, and the possible impact mechanism, this study uses the fixed effect model to test the impact of different environmental regulations on the performance of manufacturing enterprises, the mediation effect model is used to check whether or not an environmental regulation affects the performance of manufacturing enterprises by improving the level of technological innovation of enterprises, and the moderating effect model is used to examine the impact of the interaction between different environmental regulations on the performance of manufacturing enterprises. The results show that command-and-control environmental regulation inhibits the performance improvement of manufacturing enterprises, while a market-based environmental regulation enhances performance by improving the technological innovation level of enterprises. Market-based environmental regulation will alleviate the disincentive effect of command-control environmental regulation on the performance of manufacturing enterprise.
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