Impact of Corporate Environmental Responsibility on Investment Efficiency: The Moderating Roles of the Institutional Environment and Consumer Environmental Awareness
Abstract:The increasingly serious destruction of the natural environment represents a great threat to the sustainable development of human beings and the earth. Under pressure from the government and public opinion, companies must assume environmental responsibility; however, there is no conclusion on whether corporate environmental responsibility is beneficial to companies. From the perspective of investment efficiency, this paper collects panel data from Chinese listed companies from 2011 to 2016 to discuss the impac… Show more
“…Besides, to address the endogeneity problem systematically, as suggested by Newey [88], we employ instrumental variable tobit to estimate the models again. We use the lagged ERs as the instrument [89]. The results are also shown in Table 7; they also confirm our previous findings.…”
Environmental regulations (ERs) that can stimulate technological innovation (TI) are the key to enabling a win-win strategy that benefits both economic development and environmental protection. This study seeks to analyze the impacts of ERs on TI. Previous literature highlighted that the black box of TI can be decomposed into technology investment and technology transformation, but empirical studies on such a decomposition have largely been ignored. Moreover, a detailed discussion of the links between ERs and the decomposed components of TI has not been conducted in developing countries such as China. Our study attempts to address these research gaps by (i) decomposing TI using a novel data envelopment analysis (DEA) procedure and further analyzing the impacts of ERs on the decomposed components of TI and (ii) applying this novel methodology to Chinese context. Accordingly, this study is conducted in two stages. First, a novel application of the slack-based measure Network DEA model is developed to uncover the black box of TI using Chinese data in order to estimate the overall efficiency of technological innovation (TIE) and to decompose it into the efficiency of technology investment (TVE) and the efficiency of technology transformation (TTE). Second, a random effect Tobit model is applied to (i) investigate both the linear and nonlinear impacts of ERs on TIE in all sectors and (ii) examine whether the impacts of ERs on TVE and TTE in different subprocesses are heterogeneous or not. Our results have showed the benefits of decomposing TI: while technology transformation in China closely follows the trend of TI, the trend of technology investment is somewhat different. The estimation results further indicate that the impacts of ERs on TIE are nonlinear. Besides, ERs have heterogeneous impacts on the decomposed components of TI. The impacts of ERs on TVE are nonlinear, whereas the impacts of ERs on TTE are statistically insignificant.
“…Besides, to address the endogeneity problem systematically, as suggested by Newey [88], we employ instrumental variable tobit to estimate the models again. We use the lagged ERs as the instrument [89]. The results are also shown in Table 7; they also confirm our previous findings.…”
Environmental regulations (ERs) that can stimulate technological innovation (TI) are the key to enabling a win-win strategy that benefits both economic development and environmental protection. This study seeks to analyze the impacts of ERs on TI. Previous literature highlighted that the black box of TI can be decomposed into technology investment and technology transformation, but empirical studies on such a decomposition have largely been ignored. Moreover, a detailed discussion of the links between ERs and the decomposed components of TI has not been conducted in developing countries such as China. Our study attempts to address these research gaps by (i) decomposing TI using a novel data envelopment analysis (DEA) procedure and further analyzing the impacts of ERs on the decomposed components of TI and (ii) applying this novel methodology to Chinese context. Accordingly, this study is conducted in two stages. First, a novel application of the slack-based measure Network DEA model is developed to uncover the black box of TI using Chinese data in order to estimate the overall efficiency of technological innovation (TIE) and to decompose it into the efficiency of technology investment (TVE) and the efficiency of technology transformation (TTE). Second, a random effect Tobit model is applied to (i) investigate both the linear and nonlinear impacts of ERs on TIE in all sectors and (ii) examine whether the impacts of ERs on TVE and TTE in different subprocesses are heterogeneous or not. Our results have showed the benefits of decomposing TI: while technology transformation in China closely follows the trend of TI, the trend of technology investment is somewhat different. The estimation results further indicate that the impacts of ERs on TIE are nonlinear. Besides, ERs have heterogeneous impacts on the decomposed components of TI. The impacts of ERs on TVE are nonlinear, whereas the impacts of ERs on TTE are statistically insignificant.
“…Generally, a better InsE means a better market mechanism, lower government intervention, and high level of "rule by law" (Meyer et al, 2009;Zeng et al, 2019). On the contrary, in regions with worse InsE, firms generally face smaller institutional and competitive pressures and greater uncertainty.…”
Section: The Moderating Role Of Insementioning
confidence: 99%
“…For the measurement of InsE, most of the existing studies use the score of marketization index, especially in the Chinese research setting (Chen et al, 2015;Lin et al, 2017;Zeng et al, 2019)…”
The contribution of environmental investments (EIs) to environmental performance (EP) is a lively topic for environmental researchers across the world. In spite of huge amount of research, there is still lack of clarity on the moderating factors that affect the role played by EI. In this study, we distinguish EI into pollution control investments (PCIs) and pollution prevention investments (PPIs). We further investigate whether institutional environment and foreign direct investment (FDI) can play their moderating effects both on the relationship between EI and EP and on the relationships between different types of investments and EP or not. The results indicate that EI has a positive effect on EP. More specifically, PPI plays a stronger positive role in EP, but PCI does not have a significant effect on EP. In addition, both institutional environment and FDI can strengthen the positive impact of EI on EP. The increase of EI in regions with better institutional environment or high FDI can lead to greater improvement in EP. These moderating effects of institutional environment and FDI are also confirmed on the link between PPI and EP. In summary, our results reinforce the existing views that EI, and specifically PPI, can improve EP but further contribute to the understanding of the positive moderating roles played by the institutional environment and FDI on the link between EI and EP. K E Y W O R D S environmental investments, environmental performance, foreign direct investment, institutional environment, pollution control investments, pollution prevention investments 1 | INTRODUCTION How to address the environmental problems caused by the economic development is a common problem faced by the whole world. Over the past 40 years, China has made remarkable achievements in economic development. However, the environmental problems caused by the rapid economic development are still serious (Ai, Hu,
“…As a kind of CSR, corporate contributions to charity may also have a long-term effect on a firm’s image and profits [31,32]. CER can facilitate firms to achieve support from external stakeholders, gain competitive advantages [33], reduce equity financing costs [34], affect investment efficiency for the long-term [35] and in green IT capital [36].…”
With the awakening of environmental consciousness, more and more firms desire to go “green” by shifting their focus of corporate social responsibility (CSR) from charitable contributions to environmental actions called corporate environmental responsibility (CER). We develop a monopoly differential game to depict optimal corporate strategies of product price, quality, and CER. Using the Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman (HJB) equation, we analyze optimal feedback equilibrium strategies for pricing and investing in both quality and CER with/without government subsidies. Numerical simulations show that government subsidy can improve CER and profit.
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