The impacts of government R&D subsidies on green innovation: Evidence from Chinese energy-intensive firms

By Yu Bai, Siyi Song, Jianling Jiao, Ranran Yang. Journal of Cleaner Production, 2019

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Abstract Energy-intensive industries are a priority for achieving low-carbon economic growth in China, and a large number of government R&D subsidies have been injected into energy-intensive firms to support green innovation in recent years. Most of the existing literature has studied the impacts of R&D subsidies on the general innovation of high-tech firms or emerging enterprises. This paper explores the impacts of government R&D subsidies on the green innovation of energy-intensive firms. By employing propensity score matching with 527 samples of listed companies from 2010 to 2015, the empirical results show that government R&D subsidies increase the green innovation of energy-intensive firms, specifically their tendency and performance, by 107.3% and 54.1%, respectively. Heterogeneity analyses show that the impact is stronger in state-owned enterprises and in small and medium enterprises. Finally, some practical implications are put forward that may help to improve the efficiency of government R&D subsidies and promote the green innovation of energy-intensive firms.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7933c3c3bb49ec1e7b9dc0d34b713fd2d7a442aa