The Influence Of Voluntary Enviromnental Regulation On Enterprise Technological Innovation ——From The Perspective Of Public Attention And Social Capital

At present,China is in an important historical period of economic and social transformation,facing the dual pressure of environmental deterioration and economic downturn.On the one hand,compared with developed countries such as Europe and the United States,China faces more arduous challenges,such as the inharmonious relationship between man and land and serious soil pollution;In order to achieve the goal of “double carbon”,China still has a long way to go in environmental governance.It is necessary to seize the opportunity,take advantage of the trend,and strive to improve green and low-carbon technologies.On the other hand,affected by the Covid-19,the downward pressure on Chinese economic growth is obvious.For example,the difficulty of operating enterprises has increased,the income of residents has a large impact,and the market instability has intensified.Facing the new situation and new challenges,it is particularly important to strengthen the construction of environmental governance capacity and use technology innovation to support economic and social development.In recent years,China has successively issued and implemented a series of different types of environmental regulation tools.It is true that the traditional environmental regulation represented by the command and control environmental regulation has achieved remarkable results in terms of pollutant discharge and emission reduction,but there are also obvious deficiencies such as low efficiency and high cost.With its flexibility and autonomy,voluntary environmental regulation（VER）has been more and more widely used,it can reduce the uncertainty of environmental risks,overcome “regulation fatigue”,effectively stimulate the enthusiasm of enterprises to participate in environmental governance,and turn end-to-end governance to front-end prevention and control,which has shown the potential to promote enterprise technological innovation.So can VER promote enterprise technological innovation?If so,what is its mechanism of action? In order to answer the above two questions,this thesis takes A-share listed enterprises as the object.Firstly,demonstrates the direct relationship between VER and enterprise technological innovation from the micro level;Secondly,the mediating variable of social capital is introduced to explore the specific transmission path between the two;thirdly,the contextual factor of public attention is included to study its moderating effect on VER and technological innovation;Finally,considering the external market environment factor of marketization process,this thesis further discusses the regulatory effect of public attention on VER and technological innovation.The results of this thesis show that:（1）VER plays a significant role in promoting enterprise technological innovation.（2）Corporate social capital plays a partial intermediary role in the relationship between VER and enterprise technological innovation.（3）The higher the degree of public attention,the more obvious the role of VER in promoting enterprise technological innovation.（4）Further analysis from the perspective of external market shows that the higher the marketization process,the more obvious the moderating effect of public attention on VER and enterprise technological innovation.The main innovations of this thesis are as follows: Firstly,the existing research on the“Porter Hypothesis” mainly focuses on the field of command-control and market incentive environmental regulation,and there is less discussion on the relationship between voluntary participation environmental regulation and enterprise technological innovation.This thesis tests the “Porter Hypothesis” from the perspective of VER,which provides micro evidence for the application of VER in Chinese enterprises.Secondly,different from the previous literature based on provincial level data from the macro perspective,this thesis is based on the micro perspective and uses the data of A-share listed companies to examine the impact of VER on enterprise technological innovation,which is more targeted and practical.Thirdly,this thesis not only discusses the direct impact of VER on enterprise technological innovation,but also further explores their specific transmission mechanism and boundary conditions.On the one hand,the research of this thesis clarified the mechanism and boundary conditions of VER on enterprise technological innovation,fills the theoretical gap in this area to a certain extent,makes a useful supplement to the relevant research of the “Porter Hypothesis”,and provides a new idea for the way of environmental regulation;On the other hand,it has some enlightenment to the practice of VER,which helps to provide reference for enterprises to solve the problem of how to improve the level of technological innovation,and also provides supporting evidence for enterprises and governments to improve the willingness and ability of public participation.