The Impact of Human Capital on Green Technology Innovation—Moderating Role of Environmental Regulations
Jie Zhang and
Shilong Li (lishilong@cqu.edu.cn)
Additional contact information
Jie Zhang: School of Management Science and Real Estate, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400044, China
Shilong Li: School of Management Science and Real Estate, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400044, China
IJERPH, 2023, vol. 20, issue 6, 1-19
Abstract:
Green technology innovation can bring about dual benefits, i.e., technological progress and energy conservation, as well as emission reduction, which are regarded as effective means to achieve economic development and environmental protection. The influencing factors of green technology innovation have been studied from multiple angles. In order to promote the level of green technology innovation in China from a new perspective, this paper selected human capital as the independent variable, and empirically investigated the direct impact of educational and healthy human capital on green technology innovation, based on the panel data of 30 Chinese provinces (excluding Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and Tibet) from 2006 to 2016. Meanwhile, considering the current environmental policy system in China, this paper took environmental regulations as moderating variables, and analyzed the moderating role of three environmental regulations, namely, command-and-control environmental regulations, market-incentivized environmental regulations, and public voluntary environmental regulations, in the impact of human capital on green technology innovation. It was found that (1) educational human capital, with a three-period lag, and healthy human capital significantly promotes green technology innovation; (2) command-and-control environmental regulations, with a one-period lag, and market-incentivized environmental regulations promote green technology innovation, while public voluntary environmental regulations have an insignificant impact on green technology innovation; (3) the moderating effect of command-and-control and market-incentivized environmental regulations in the impact of human capital on green technology innovation is not significant. For public voluntary environmental regulations, the moderating effect between educational human capital and green technology innovation is significantly negative, while the moderating effect of healthy human capital on green technology innovation is not significant.
Keywords: educational human capital; healthy human capital; environmental regulations; green technology innovation; moderating role (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/20/6/4803/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/20/6/4803/ (text/html)
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:gam:jijerp:v:20:y:2023:i:6:p:4803-:d:1091810
Access Statistics for this article
IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu
More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager (indexing@mdpi.com).