环境规制压力会促进企业转型升级吗

Can State Environment Pressure Push Corporate Transformation and Upgrading?

在愈发严厉的环境规制下,什么样的民营企业更有可能采取转型升级的应对策略,从而实现环境治理与高质量发展相融合,已成为一个重要议题。通过分析2016年第12次中国私营企业调查数据,本文突破了现有文献有关环境规制的设计,真正将环境规制对企业的影响落实到企业所有者/管理者层面上:企业管理者的政府环境规制压力越大,企业越会进行技术创新转型升级。在使用工具变量法和Heckman两阶段模型分别解决内生性问题、样本自选择问题以及其他敏感性检验后,本文的结论依然稳健。在作用机制的检验上,本文的创新是将企业环境成本划分为对内(生产制造、环境治理)和对外(社会公关)两维度,政府环境规制压力迫使企业增加对环境治理、社会公关和生产制造成本的投入,是政府环境规制压力对企业技术创新转型影响的部分中介因子。本文考察来自周边社区、消费者和同行竞争者三方的环保压力发现,它们分别与政府环境规制压力间存在明显的替代关系,从而增加了以往经济/产业分析中很少注意到的“社会维度”。进一步分析发现,相对于经济发达程度低、执法环境差地区的企业,政府环境规制压力对经济发达程度高、执法环境好地区企业技术升级的影响更强。

In recent years, the environmental protection has become an irreversible trend. Many local governments have strictly implemented a series of thunderous measures such as reduction of coal consumption, coal-to-gas, standard upgrading, and production restriction. In particular, the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China gave prominence to the construction of ecological civilization to promote the ecological civilization with an unprecedented intensity. Many firms have been shut down for rectification and even closed down. However, some firms have seized this historical opportunity to eliminate their opponents, and finally completed the transformation and upgrading themselves. Therefore, under the pressure of an unprecedented environmental protection trend, what kind of firm is more likely to adopt a strategy of transformation and upgrading? This paper attempts to explore the evergreen issue of the relationship between environmental regulation and enterprise transformation and upgrading from the perspective of government environmental regulation pressure, and make its own contributions to explain the mechanism of this relationship.Limited by the difficulty of obtaining data resources, when studying the impact of environmental regulation on firms’ environmental governance, existing research generally uses provincial, industrial or corporate-level data as a substitution variable for environmental regulation faced by firms, and the conclusions drawn below are quite different and even opposite under different measurement methods.Obviously, the existing measurement methods will cause obvious logical faults. The impact of environmental regulation pressures measured at the meso-economic level or micro-level corporate financial data level on micro-level corporate behavior is exerted through too many mediators, so that the action mechanism will not be able to be effectively captured, in particular, the role of business owners/managers in business decision-making will be ignored. For this reason, different from the existing literature, this paper uses the 12th Chinese Private Enterprise Survey Data(CPES) in 2016 as a sample, and takes the degree of pressure of the government environmental regulation on business owners faced in the survey as a substitution variable for environmental regulation, which breaks through the existing literature relates to the design of environmental regulation, so as to truly measure the impact of environmental regulation on the firms at the firm owner/manager level. This method not only enriches the measurement methods of environmental regulation pressure by introducing the cognition/perception of corporate decision-makers into the corporate environmental strategic decision-making framework, but also makes up for the shortcomings of existing research in terms of design. In addition, this paper also makes contributions on the following two aspects. First, it divides the corporate environmental cost into internal(manufacturing,environmental governance) and external(social public relations) dimensions in mechanism exploration for the first time, and based on the division, it explores the path of government environmental regulation affecting corporate transformation and upgrading. This paper helps us to grasp and clarify the mechanism of government environmental regulation affecting the transformation and upgrading of firms. Second, we empirically study the moderating role of informal environmental regulation pressure(community groups,consumers, and peer competitors) on the relationship between formal environmental regulation pressure(government) and firms’ transformation and upgrading. The empirical analysis finds that the greater the manager’s perception of government environmental regulation pressure, the more likely firms will adopt strategies of transformation and upgrading. The test of the mechanism of action shows that the increase in costs of corporate environmental governance, social public relations and production are an important intermediary factor through which environmental regulation pressure affects the transformation and upgrading of firms. Furthermore,there is an obvious substitute relationship between environmental protection pressure from surrounding communities, consumers and competitors in the same industry and government environmental regulation pressure in terms of whether firms affected by government environmental regulation will adopt transformation and upgrading strategies. The further analysis finds that compared with firms in areas with low economic development level and poor law enforcement environment, government environmental regulation have a stronger impact on the technological and upgrading of firms in areas with high economic development level and good law enforcement environment.