Has the sustainable energy transition in China's resource-based cities promoted green technology innovation in firms?

Jiamu Sun, Jiaan Xue and Xiaodong Qiu

Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, 2023, vol. 87, issue PA

Abstract: Sustainable energy access for all cities is a major concern. Using a sample of listed companies between 2007 and 2018 in China's heavy pollution industries, this paper considers the Plan for the Sustainable Development of Resource-based Cities in China (2013–2020) (hereafter referred to as “SE policy”) as a quasi-natural experiment to evaluate the impact of a sustainable energy policy for resource-based cities (RBCs) on firm-level green behavior based on difference-in-differences (DID) model and further tests the heterogeneity of impact. The main findings are presented as follows:(1) The implementation of SE policy promotes heavily polluting firms' green technology innovation. After several robustness tests, the result is still valid. (2) There is a greater impact of SE policy on firms' green technology innovation among state-owned enterprises (SOEs) when compared with non-SOEs. (3) The impact of SE policy on firms' green technology innovation is greater among firms with a high degree of slack resources. In a nutshell, enacting a sustainable energy policy for RBCs is successful in encouraging green behavior among firms in RBCs.

Keywords: Sustainable energy policy; Resource-based cities; Firm's green technology innovation; Difference-in-differences model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0038012122001203
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:soceps:v:87:y:2023:i:pa:s0038012122001203

DOI: 10.1016/j.seps.2022.101330

Access Statistics for this article

Socio-Economic Planning Sciences is currently edited by Barnett R. Parker

More articles in Socio-Economic Planning Sciences from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().