Corporate Green Bond Issuances And Tactical Green Innovations

A tactical innovation is a speculative innovation behavior conducted by firms for acquiring self-interest from the preferential policies or other benefits,which mostly shows in number instead of the quantity of patents,i.e.the number of green invention patents is much less than the non-invention ones.As one of the green financial instruments,green bonds have many advantages such as a relatively lower fundrasing cost,less financing constraints and good environmental reputation.The question is if firms will issue green bonds for some benefits by taking tactical action on their green innovations?In order to find out how green bonds policy influence the green innovation,this thesis examined average green bonds effects on green innovation measured by green patents of 53 companies listed in China’s stock market that issued green bonds through year 2006-2021.Using difference-in-differences(DiD)with multiple time periods in Stata 17 to analyze the relationship between green bonds and green innovation that represented by green patents during the period of 2012-2021.In order to avoid selection bias,151 similar listed companies that have never issued green bonds while held green patents during the same period of 2012-2021 were screened out by PSM method as a control group to investigate whether green bonds induced corporate tactical innovation.The findings are(ⅰ)green bonds play a significant role in promoting firm green innovations;(ⅱ)green bonds have a greater impact on utility patents than green invention patents;(ⅲ)for the whole sample green bonds show insignificant to tactical innovations,but for subsample tactical innovations appear in the group of non-SOE companies.The contributions of this thesis are(ⅰ)to put forward the concept of corporate tactical green innovation and enlarge its concept framework,(ⅱ)research the green innovations led by motivation in the fields of green bonds issurance and green innovations,(ⅲ)and have different findings from former research.This is helpful for policymakers to focus on the inner motivation of companies regarding their green innovation conducts so as to facilitate a green sustainable economy.