The Impact Of Carbon Emissions Trading Scheme On Firm R&D Investment

In recent years,the issue of curbing global warming has received continuous attention from the world.More and more countries have begun to launch carbon emissions trading markets(ETS)under the recommendations of the "United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change" and the "Kyoto Protocol" to achieve the greenhouse gas reduction targets of their respective countries.As a developing country and the country with the largest carbon emissions,China's challenge is to achieve high-quality economic growth and control greenhouse gas emissions at the same time.As a result,the synergy between green and low-carbon and technological innovation has been greatly enhanced.R&D investment,which is an important path of technological innovation,has also become one of the focus of ETS research.This article uses the "quasi-natural experiment" of regional ETS pilot launched by China in 2013 to study its impact on the R&D investment of Chinese enterprises.After a mathematical model analysis of the mechanism that carbon emissions trading affects corporate R&D investment which based on environmental regulation theory,this paper uses the financial data of A-share listed companies from 2011 to 2018 and carbon trading data to conduct an empirical study on the impact of the pilot on carbon quota control companies'R&D investment.This article first uses propensity score matching to obtain a set of“control group" listed companies that are close to the“experimental group" listed companies in terms of quota control probability but are not actually controlled by quotas.Secondly,this paper uses the samples synthesized by these two groups of listed companies to regress the discrete differences-in-differences model without carbon price and continuous differences-in-differences model with carbon price.The results of this study show that compared with the non-controlled enterprises,the R&D investment of controlled enterprises has significantly increased after quota control,and it has increased with the rise in ETS prices.The increased R&D investment may not be all environmental protection technology investment,but may also include a significant proportion of non-environmental technology investment.The degree to which a company's R&D investment responds to carbon prices may include advance preparations made by the company for future carbon price expectations.Based on this conclusion,in order to further improve the operation mechanism of the national ETS,this article believes that on the premise of minimizing the short-term macroeconomic shocks,the system can be improved from the perspective of increasing the carbon price and the effect of carbon price transmission Therefore,combined with regional and foreign pilot experience,this article put forward three policy recommendations:increase the proportion of allowance auctions,increase the activity of the carbon trading market and strengthening carbon trading information disclosure.