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Does air pollution collaborative governance promote green technology innovation? Evidence from China

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Abstract

With the data of Chinese A-share-listed companies from 2004 to 2017, this paper builds a difference-in-differences model to investigate the impact of air pollution collaborative governance on green technology innovation. The main results show that air pollution collaborative governance promotes green technology innovation, and a series of robustness tests also verify this conclusion. Patent heterogeneity analysis suggests that air pollution collaborative governance increases the number of green utility model patents, but has no obvious impact on green invention patents. In terms of enterprise heterogeneity, air pollution collaborative governance can effectively stimulate the non-heavy-polluting enterprises to innovate green technology, but the incentive effect on heavy-polluting enterprises is not evident. Moreover, by constructing a mediating effect model and a moderating effect model, mechanism analysis reveals that R&D investment plays a positive mediating role in the impact of air pollution collaborative governance on green technology innovation, and the increase of government subsidy also enhances the promotion effect of air pollution collaborative governance on green technology innovation.

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Data availability

The datasets used, generated, and analyzed during the current study are available in the State Intellectual Property Office of the People’s Republic of China and the China Stock Market and Accounting Research Database.

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Funding

This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71903114) and Chinese National Funding of Social Sciences (Grant No. 18CJL025).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics, Shandong Technology and Business University, Yantai, China

    Haibo Sun & Zan Zhang

  2. School of Finance, Shandong Technology and Business University, 191 Binhai Middle Road, Laishan District, Yantai, Shandong Province, China

    Zhonglu Liu

Authors
  1. Haibo Sun
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  2. Zan Zhang
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  3. Zhonglu Liu
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by Haibo Sun and Zan Zhang. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Zan Zhang and Zhonglu Liu.

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Correspondence to Zhonglu Liu.

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Sun, H., Zhang, Z. & Liu, Z. Does air pollution collaborative governance promote green technology innovation? Evidence from China. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 51609–51622 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-19535-x

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