Can the New Energy Vehicle Pilot Policy Achieve Green Innovation and Emission Reduction?—A Difference-in-Differences Analysis on the Evaluation of China’s New Energy Fiscal Subsidy Policy

Abstract

Whether the new energy vehicle pilot policy (NEVPP) can achieve green innovation and emission reduction is an important exploration for China to achieve green and sustainable development. This research aims to empirically investigate the impact, impact mechanism, and heterogeneity characteristics of the NEVPP on urban green innovation and emission reduction based on panel data from 281 cities in China from 2004 to 2017, using difference-in-differences (DID) methods and fixed effect (FE) models. The results show that the NEVPP significantly reduces the carbon dioxide emissions of the pilot cities but significantly inhibits the green innovation, and the results are robust to the placebo test, propensity score matching DID (PSM-DID) test, instrumental variable (IV) estimation, emissions trading system (ETS), and Carbon-ETS interference test, and change of the dependent variable. In addition, further studies have shown that the NEVPP’s emission reduction effects are mainly achieved by reducing energy consumption, promoting technological innovation, and adjusting industrial structure. Moreover, we found that the NEVPP performed better in the regions where the level of economic development is high, the local government has a good relationship with the market, and the level of non-state economic development is high. In general, our research results show that the NEVPP has achieved innovation and emission reduction policy effects in China, but it is also accompanied by an inhibitory effect on green technological innovation.

Green finance policy and enterprise green development: Evidence from China

“…It indicates that a large number of enterprises suffer from a low level of green innovation. Among the control variables, the mean and median of the enterprise fundamental variables, such as listed years and property rights, are similar to the statistical results of most existing related studies (Zhang et al, 2022; Zhang et al, 2023; Zheng et al, 2022).…”

Can the Carbon Emissions Trading System Improve the Green Total Factor Productivity of the Pilot Cities?—A Spatial Difference-in-Differences Econometric Analysis in China

“…CETS has a significant promotion and negative spatial siphon effect on GTFP in pilot cities and the aforementioned parallel trend test has justified the application of the SDID method; however, considering that the non-random establishment of CETS pilot areas may lead to biased estimation results [48], we further adopt the propensity score matching SDID (PSM-SDID) method to avoid endogenous selection bias. We select urban economic development level, population size, energy consumption scale, and industrial structure as matching characteristic variables and then perform logistic regression and kernel matching to obtain matching samples and estimate them according to Formula (1).…”

Tax Incentives, R&D Manipulation, and Corporate Innovation Performance: Evidence from Listed Companies in China

“…In Spain, large companies avoid stricter enforcement by clustering just below the tax enforcement threshold [24,25]. In China, there are clusters of enterprises near the threshold of R&D tax incentives [3,26,27].…”

“…Classical economic theory and endogenous economic theory agree that technological innovation plays a vital role in the process of economic development. Therefore, the government has a motivation to seek the optimal allocation of resources by intervening and providing support to corporate R&D investment to promote enterprise technological innovation [1][2][3]. The following are stipulated in the outline of China's 14th Five-Year Plan: improving the market-oriented technical innovation mechanism, strengthening the status of enterprise innovation's main body, accelerating the enterprise agglomeration of various innovative elements, and formation of a market-oriented technology innovation system in which enterprise is the main body, is market-oriented, and in which there is depth of fusion.…”