市场激励型环境规制可以推动企业技术创新吗?--基于中国碳排放权交易机制的自然实验

Can Market-Incentive Environmental Regulation Promote Corporate Innovation? A Natural Experiment Based on China’s Carbon Emissions Trading Mechanism

提高环境标准以推进企业低碳环保转型是供给侧结构性改革的重要内容。在众多环境规制的政策工具中,以市场激励为导向的排放权交易机制在西方国家得到了较为广泛的认可与应用,但是否同样适用于尚处在转轨期的新型中国市场还有待进一步检验。本文基于中国2013年开始试点实施的碳排放权交易机制,考察了市场激励型的环境规制对中国企业技术创新的影响。研究发现:碳排放权交易机制的实施显著推动了企业的技术创新,且当碳市场的流动性程度越高,该市场激励型环境规制对企业技术创新的推动作用更加明显。但企业成本转嫁能力会在一定程度上削弱该环境规制的积极影响,当企业所承受的产品市场竞争程度更低、企业对客户和供应商的议价能力更高时,碳排放权交易机制对企业技术创新的推动作用相对降低。综上,本文的研究不仅从市场激励的角度丰富了环境规制与企业技术创新的相关文献,同时也为中国碳排放权交易实施的政策效果提供了微观证据,研究结论可为后续在全国范围内统一推进碳排放权交易市场建设提供政策参考。

"Socialism with Chinese characteristics" has entered a new era, in which the major social contradiction is between people’s growing needs for a better life and the problem of inadequate and unbalanced development. China must address the current reality of severe environmental pollution as the same time as alleviating these major social contradictions. Environmental problems have many externalities, and thus environmental pollution control relies heavily on environmental regulation to internalize external costs. The "Porter hypothesis" suggests that reasonable and strict environmental regulation can promote enterprises’ technological innovation;the resulting first-mover advantage can compensate for the costs of environmental regulation and achieve a win-win situation. Based on this argument, formulating and implementing appropriate and effective environmental regulation policies that realize the Porter hypothesis have become a key issue in the process of building socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era.Depending on the regulatory bodies and mechanisms involved, environmental regulation can be divided into two types: command control and market incentive. Since the beginning of the 21 st century, market-incentive environmental regulation policies have been gradually implemented in China. Around 2002, China tentatively established an emissions trading policy mainly for sulfur dioxide emissions. In June 2013, China pioneered the introduction of a carbon emissions trading mechanism originating in the developed capital markets of Europe and the United States, and it successively established carbon trading exchanges in seven regions. At the end of 2017, the National Development and Reform Commission announced an official nationwide launch of a unified market for carbon emissions trading. This gradual development of a carbon emissions trading mechanism indicates that China’s environmental regulation system is gradually shifting from command control to market incentives. This paper uses data on Chinese listed companies from 2011 to 2016, based on the analytical framework of Porter hypothesis, and tests whether the carbon emissions trading mechanism can promote technological innovation. This paper finds that the implementation of carbon emissions trading has significantly promoted technological innovation in regulated enterprises. However, the positive effects of carbon emissions trading on firm innovation are constrained in two aspects. First, the positive effects of carbon emissions trading on the technological innovation of enterprises is stronger if the carbon market is more liquid. Second, the positive effects decrease if the industry in which the company is located is less competitive and the concentration of customers or suppliers is lower.The main contributions of our study are as follows. First, based on the Chinese institutional background, relevant studies have paid more attention to the policy effects of command control environmental regulation. In contrast, this paper focuses on the implemented carbon emissions trading mechanism and tests whether market-incentive environmental regulation can achieve the Porter effect in China. Second, based on the inherent design differences between the seven Chinese carbon trading markets, our paper finds that liquidity constraints in a carbon market will reduce the positive impact of carbon emissions trading on enterprise technology innovation. Third, the relationship between environmental regulation and enterprise technology innovation is a matter of controversy. From an examination of the cost transfer ability of enterprises under environmental regulation, this paper finds that the positive impact of carbon emissions trading on enterprise technology innovation mainly affects enterprises with relatively low cost transfer ability.