| Emission trading scheme as a market-driven environmental regulation,By using the emission rights as a commodity to circulate in the market,,the role of market’s resource allocation has been fully utilized,so that the government’s call for environmental protection is no longer independent of the daily operations of enterprises,but it is really included in the production costs of the company.Guided by the market price of emission rights,enterprises can independently determine the amount of pollutants discharged,sell redundant emission rights to obtain income or purchase emission rights to expand production scale.Therefore,emission trading scheme will maybe affect the corporate cost stickiness by affecting the allocation of surplus resources.The data of Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies in China’s financial market from 2002 to 2012 were selected as the research object,and the causal effect of the emission trading scheme on the stickiness cost was studied.Firstly,the domestic and foreign related research on command-controlled environmental regulation,market-driven environmental regulation and cost stickiness is systematically sorted out,and the definition of the concept of emission trading scheme and cost stickiness is taken as the theoretical basis.Secondly,through the theoretical analysis of the direct,indirect and heterogeneous influence mechanism of the emission trading scheme on cost stickiness of the pilot enterprises is studied,and the research hypothesis of this paper is proposed.Then,taking the pilot policy of emission trading scheme in 2007 as a quasi-natural experiment,constructing a difference-in-difference model to empirically test the direct impact effect of the emission trading scheme on corporate cost stickiness,and test the parallel trend hypothesis of the empirical results,consider the panel interaction effect test,exclude other policy interference tests and placebo tests,and use the traditional ABJ model to test the robustness of the empirical results;further use innovative patent applications as mediators,using median effect analysis method based on stepwise regression method and mediating effect analysis based on bootstrap confidence interval estimation,the mediating effect of the innovation patent application on the causal relationship between the emission trading scheme and the cost stickiness of the pilot enterprise is tested,And using the instrumental variable 2SLS method to carry out endogeneity test on the regression results of the stepwise regression method;Considering the impact of corporate heterogeneity on the relationship between the two,the paper uses the method of group regression from the three aspects of corporate financing constraint,agency cost and rent-seeking cost,empirically analyzes the heterogeneity of the emission trading scheme on the cost stickiness of pilot enterprises.Finally,based on the results obtained by the empirical research,proposing countermeasures for the further construction of China’s environmental rights trading market,improving the market mechanism of emission trading scheme and promoting enterprises to carry out innovative activities;providing a basis for understanding the cost management behavior of enterprises and improving the efficiency of internal resource allocation.The results of empirical research show that:(1)The implementation of the trading policy of emission rights market has significantly increased the cost stickiness of the pilot enterprises compared with non-pilot enterprises,and the improvement effect reached 67.65%,and the results of the parallel trend hypothesis test showed that the trend of the cost stickiness of the experimental group and the control group before the policy pilot was the same,the results of the panel interaction fixed effect,the interference of the carbon emission trading pilot,the randomized experimental group and the control group,and using the ABJ model for robustness test have consolidated the causal relationship refinement between the emission trading scheme and increase of the cost stickiness of the pilot enterprises.(2)The mediation effect analysis based on stepwise regression method and the mediation effect analysis based on bootstrap method confidence interval estimation show that the enterprise innovation patent application is a mediator variable for the increase of the cost of the pilot enterprise in the emission trading.That is to say,the emission trading scheme has a significant innovation incentive effect on the pilot enterprises,which in turn increases the cost stickiness of the pilot enterprises.After excluding the interference of endogenous problems,the conclusion is still significant.(3)In the heterogeneity effect analysis,the smaller the enterprise financing constraint,the effect of the emission trading scheme on the cost stickiness of the pilot enterprises is more obvious;the lower the agency cost of the enterprise,the effect of the emission trading scheme on the cost stickiness of the pilot enterprises is more obvious;the lower the rent-seeking cost of the enterprise,the effect of the emission trading scheme on the cost stickiness of the pilot enterprises is more obvious.Under the background of building a national unified carbon emission market,the macro environmental rights trading policy—emission trading scheme and microenterprise cost control behaviors are included in the same research framework,which not only enriches the economic consequences of market-driven environmental regulation.Moreover,it provides theoretical advice and guidance for further establishing a national market incentive environmental regulation system,and at the same time expands the research on the factors affecting corporate cost stickiness.The marginal contribution of this paper is as follows:(1)Different from the previous literature,the macro-environmental policy and enterprise expense management is included in the same research framework for the first time,providing a measure for the effect evaluation of the impact of the emission trading schemes on the cost stickiness;(2)based on the establishment of a difference-in-difference model to explore the direct effect of emission trading scheme on the cost stickiness,using stepwise regression and bootstrap’s mediation effect analysis method,clarifying the path of emission trading scheme by affecting corporate innovation and then acting on cost stickiness,and using the instrumental variable 2SLS method to carry out endogeneity test on the regression results of the stepwise regression method,the patent application data of sample listed companies from 2002 to 2012 were collected manually,strive to provide accurate and quantifiable evidence for emission trading scheme to promote enterprise innovation and thus increase corporate cost stickiness;(3)from the perspective of financing constraints,agency costs and rent-seeking costs,we explore the heterogeneous effects of emission trading scheme on the impact of cost stickiness;(4)in order to ensure the effectiveness of the evaluation of policy effects,from various angles,a variety of robustness test methods were used to verify the robustness of the parallel trend hypothesis and empirical results. |
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