Abstract
Findings from prior studies regarding the relationship between national institutional pressures and corporate green innovation have been mixed. To address this gap, we consider the moderating effects of public agents (provincial officials) and private agents (corporate CEOs) to investigate corporate green innovation in response to institutional pressures. Using the method of difference-in-difference, we examine the data from 722 publicly listed Chinese firms between 2007 and 2019, a period associated with the implementation of China’s Twelfth Five-Year Plan which increase the emphasis on social indicators for national development. Our results firstly show that institutional pressures caused by Twelfth Five-Year Plan significantly facilitate polluting-firms’ green innovation relative to clean-firms, and the effect is stronger when public agents are more concerned about promotion to the central government or private agents have greater concerns for legitimacy, meanwhile not producing an a real “incentive effect” on corporate green innovation, but a “crowding-out effect” on existing innovation. Furthermore, results also suggest institutional pressures mainly induced polluting-firms’ strategic innovation behaviors, and the incentive effects of institutional pressures on polluting-firms’ green innovation are different in terms of firms’ ownership and size. Our results generate important theoretical and practical implications.
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Notes
The Five-Year Plan, also known as the Outline of the Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development of the People’s Republic of China, is an important mode and institutional arrangement for the Communist Party of China to govern the country. It is the phased deployment and arrangement of China’s overall development strategy, and also a “compass” for China’s economic and social development. China’s Five-Year Plan plays an irreplaceable role in building consensus on development, guiding development direction, allocating public resources and achieving strategic goals. The goals of the Five-Year Plan are not set in stone, but adjusted in light of changing actual conditions. In order to achieve the overall goal, the Five-Year Plan also puts forward targeted development concepts according to different development stages.
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This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Numbers: 72173014) and supported by The Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant Number: DUT21RW210) and also supported by Liaoning Provincial Social Science Planning Fund (Grant Number: L20AJY014).
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Shuming Ren contributed to the study conception, supervision, and writing-review & editing. Mengna Wang contributed to data collection, methodology, estimations, analysis, and writing-original draft. All authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript and all authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Ren, S., Wang, M. Institutional pressures as drivers of corporate green innovation: do provincial officials and CEOs matter?. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30, 40608–40629 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-24962-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-24962-x