The effect of green fiscal policy on green technological innovation: evidence from energy saving and emission reduction fiscal policy.

The "National Comprehensive demonstration of Energy Saving and Emission Reduction Fiscal Policy" (ESER policy) is a green fiscal policy to facilitate China's green sustainable development. Green sustainable development is facilitated by green technological innovation. Thus, evaluating the influence of the ESER policy on green technological innovation is essential. This study employs the difference-in-differences model to assess the ESER policy effects. The findings suggest that the ESER policy facilitates green technological innovation, but the policy effect has inhibited green technology innovation in neighboring cities. Mechanism analysis indicates that this policy effect is realized through increasing scientific research investment intensity and promoting industrial structure upgrading. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that this policy is effective in facilitating green technological innovation when performed in eastern, non-old industrial base, non-resource-based, and high green innovation level cities. In addition, the ESER policy implemented in conjunction with innovation policy can be more effective in promoting green technological innovation. These results provide valuable insights for improving the ESER policy and offer helpful guidelines for green fiscal policymaking in other countries.

The outgoing audit of natural resources assets and enterprise productivity: New evidence from difference-in-differences-in-differences in China.

Despite increasing evidence documenting the role of the outgoing audit of natural resources (OANRA) in environmental governance and enterprise innovation, little is known about its impact on enterprises' total factor productivity (TFP). To address this question, we treat the OANRA policy launched in 2014 in China as a quasi-natural experiment. We adopt a difference-in-differences-in-differences (DDD) method that exploits three-dimensional variations: city (i.e., OANRA cities versus non-OANRA cities), industry (i.e., more polluting industries versus less polluting ones), and year (i.e., before and after the OANRA policy). Employing a dataset of Chinese industrial listed companies from 2012 to 2019, we reveal that after the OANRA implementation, enterprises' TFP in more polluting industries of OANRA cities decreases by 4.0%. Our mechanism analysis shows that the OANRA restrains the TFP by reducing the financing scale of enterprises and increasing environmental investment of governments. Further, the heterogeneity analysis finds the inhibitory effect of the OANRA is more prominent in large-scale and state-owned enterprises, as well as enterprises located in eastern, low fiscal pressure, and high pollutant emission cities. Our findings provide support for the neoclassical economics hypothesis that the OANRA increases enterprises' compliance costs and decreases their productivity.

China's efforts towards carbon neutrality: Does energy-saving and emission-reduction policy mitigate carbon emissions?

To achieve green and low-carbon development, the Chinese government has selected pilot cities to implement the energy-saving and emission-reduction (ESER) policy in three batches since 2011. So far, there has been no systematic evidence on whether this policy can mitigate carbon emissions. To identify the causal impact of the ESER policy on carbon emissions, we exploit variations in the timing of this policy across cities and assemble a panel dataset of China's 284 cities from 2003 to 2019. Based on a difference-in-differences (DID) framework, we find a relative decline in carbon emissions in pilot cities after the ESER policy implementation, and in particular, this effect follows an increasing trend over time. Our mechanism analysis further corroborates that the carbon-reduction effect of the ESER policy could be achieved through promoting energy-saving effect, optimizing structure effect and strengthening green technique effect. In addition, the observed effect is abundantly heterogeneous in terms of geographic location, environmental constraint, financial self-sufficiency, resource endowment and carbon emissions distribution. Our findings provide empirical evidence from developing countries on the effectiveness of carbon-reduction policy, which demonstrates China's determination to achieve its two climate goals (carbon peaking by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060).