Urban Air Quality,Enterprise Innovation And Stock Returns

In recent years,air pollution has become an extremely serious ecological problem in China,which is an inevitable result of the current social and economic development and the increasing material needs of the people in the new era.Take a typical city as an example.On January 12,2013,the PM2.5 index in Beijing reached a record 886 points,exceeding the limit of measuring equipment.It can be seen that air pollution has badly threatened people’s lives,health and psychological emotions of the public,which is reflected in daily work and life.Therefore,The State Council promptly issued the Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan to address the domestic air pollution problem,indicating the goal of "winning the battle to protect the blue sky" in the report of the 19 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China,and also actively responding to the idea that "clear waters and green mountains are gold and silver mountains" always emphasized and valued by the General Secretary.The current air quality problem needs long-term attention from all social parties and reasonable and effective measures to be taken to improve it,so as to truly meet the strategic goal of sustainable development.Meanwhile,in order to make a steady transition to a higher quality stage of development,The State Council has formulated a development strategy to improve the country’s independent innovation capacity and put forward the development goal of building an innovative country.In the 2019 work report,the government pointed out that "innovation leads development",which conveyed the direction of future innovation to the public.Beyond doubt,innovation has always been a great source of economic growth and a vital engine for our country’s future economic development.In the process of building an innovation-oriented country,a key link is to improve the independent innovation ability of micro enterprises.Knowledge and technology innovation can be truly transformed into scale productivity and improve the overall strength of the country only through enterprises and creative transformation of human capital in enterprises,especially scientific and technological talents.Therefore,in the current background of vigorously encouraging innovation,how to combine ecological environment and economic development more effectively to play its maximum effect is a major topic that needs our in-depth thinking.This paper,by using 2013-2019 China’s ministry of urban air quality data,combing the environmental economic theory,theory of technological innovation,theory of human capital,behavioral finance theory and related theoretical basis,and empirically tests the impact of air quality on different types of innovation performance of enterprises in Chinese cities by combining relevant domestic and foreign research literature.This paper discusses the difference of influence from the level of enterprise,industry and city through the nature of equity of enterprise,the nature of industry in which the firm is located and the marketization degree of the location of the firm.At the same time,the possible transmission mechanism and channel of human capital are studied from the aspects of internal and external human capital factors.Further,on the basis of the previous,this paper analyzes whether there is a synergistic effect between urban air quality and enterprise innovation performance on stock excess return rate,and adopts different methods to measure excess return rate to guarantee the dependability of research results.The finding shows that :(1)there is a remarkable negative correlation between urban air quality and overall innovation performance of enterprises in China,that is,the higher the urban air quality,the better the overall innovation performance of enterprises;Specifically,there is a remarkable negative correlation between urban air quality and enterprise invention patent innovation and utility model patent innovation,while there is no remarkable negative correlation between urban air quality and appearance patent innovation.After a series of robustness and endogeneity tests,such as replacement of control variables,replacement of other pollutant indicators,control of city and industry dummy variables,and instrumental variable method,the above conclusions are still valid.(2)Heterogeneity test shows that there is no remarkable difference in the impact of urban air quality on enterprise innovation performance among enterprises with different equity nature,but in the high-tech industry and the location of enterprises with higher degree of marketization,Urban air quality plays a stronger role in promoting enterprise innovation performance.(3)The mechanism analysis shows that poor urban air quality can weaken the innovation performance of enterprises by affecting different types of human capital,specifically,reducing the number of technical personnel within enterprises and the number of students in the universities where enterprises are located.(4)Further analysis shows that there is a positive synergistic effect between urban air quality and enterprise innovation performance on the excess return of stock,that is,the better the urban air quality is,the more remarkable the positive effect of enterprise innovation performance on the excess return of stock.In conclusion,the above analysis results indicate that urban air quality in China can effectively affect the innovation performance of enterprises,and both of them can jointly promote the improvement of corporate stock returns.