The impact of market-incentive environmental regulation policies on corporate environmental costs: Evidence from China’s carbon trading policy
Zhilong Qin,
Chao Tu,
Weihui Han and
Qintong Jiang
PLOS ONE, 2024, vol. 19, issue 2, 1-20
Abstract:
As the world’s largest emitter of carbon, China has implemented a series of environmental regulatory policies to reduce emissions. However, most of these environmental regulations have been at the expense of increased corporate environmental costs. Therefore, research on how to efficiently control these costs is of significant practical importance. This paper uses the China’s carbon trading policy (CTP) implemented in 2013 as a quasi-natural experiment, utilizing data from Chinese listed manufacturing firms between 2008 and 2020. Employing a difference-in-differences (DID) model, the study investigates the impact of market-incentive environmental regulatory policies (ERP) on environmental costs. The findings reveal that CTP significantly reduced the environmental costs of firms, confirming the positive and vital role market-incentive ERP can play in environmental protection and cost control. These conclusions remain robust after a series of stability tests. Mechanism analysis suggests that the cost reductions brought by market-incentive ERP are primarily achieved through increasing green innovation. Heterogeneity analysis shows that non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs), key polluting firms, firms with lower financial constraints, and firms with lower total production efficiency benefit more from market-incentive environmental regulatory policies. This study provides new empirical evidence for government policy-making aimed at achieving long-term sustainable development.
Date: 2024
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0297003 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 97003&type=printable (application/pdf)
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:plo:pone00:0297003
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0297003
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().