Senior Executives’ Environmental Awareness,Corporate Environmental Investment And Corporate Green Innovation

It has been more than 40 years since the reform and opening up.With the rapid development of China’s economy,our country has gradually become the second largest economy in the world.However,with the development of economy,the“High energy consumption” and“High pollution” business model of traditional enterprises has led to more serious environmental pollution and waste of resources in China.The smog in cities and the frequent environmental pollution incidents reported by various places have seriously endangered people’s work safety and health.It has become a consensus of the whole society to control pollution and protect the environment.This has prompted the government to formulate more stringent environmental protection policies and to step up its efforts to advocate for enterprises to upgrade their industrial structure driven by green innovation,so as to achieve the harmonious coexistence of economic improvement and the natural environment,and then ensure the sustainable development of the economy and the balance of the ecological environment.Therefore,it is of great theoretical and practical significance to study how to promote the corporate green innovation.Executives play an important role in the daily activities of enterprises,they decide the decision-making of enterprises in their business activities,and also directly affect the future development of enterprises,executives’ awareness of environmental issues will affect their attitude and positive degree towards the green innovation activities of enterprises,which may have an important impact on the green innovation activities of enterprises.Corporate environmental investment can provide the necessary financial support for corporate green innovation,and can make the enterprise more inclined to carry out green innovation activities,so it may also affect the corporate green innovation.The environmental investment is the result of capital allocation,so to some extent,it will be affected by the decision-making of enterprise capital allocation.On the one hand,corporate environmental investment is the pillar of corporate green innovation activities,on the other hand,it is also influenced by the decision-making of executives’ environmental awareness,it is of theoretical and practical value to study the mediating effect between executives’ environmental awareness and corporate green innovation.Based on the data of 702 a-share manufacturing companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen from 2013 to 2020,this paper studies the relationship between senior executives’ environmental awareness and corporate green innovation,and discusses the action path of corporate environmental investment.The main conclusions are as follows:(1)Executives’ environmental awareness can positively promote corporate green innovation.The empirical results show that senior executives’ environmental awareness has a positive impact on green innovation,and senior executives who have a strong awareness of environmental issues are more likely to make decisions conducive to green innovation activities.(2)Corporate environmental investment plays an intermediary role in the relationship between senior executives’ environmental awareness and corporate green innovation.On the one hand,senior executives with a high degree of environmental awareness will view environmental investment as an opportunity to enhance the environmental and economic benefits of their enterprises and will be aware of the social responsibilities that they should fulfill to affect their environmental investment.On the other hand,corporate environmental investment makes companies more inclined to carry out green innovation activities,and provide financial support for this.Therefore,this paper suggests that the government and enterprises should pay attention to the environmental awareness training of senior management team,play a guiding role,and then improve the environmental awareness of enterprise managers,and cultivate their own environmental protection culture.At the same time,enterprises should appropriately expand the scale of enterprise environmental protection investment and optimize the structure of corporate environmental investment,thus improve the level of corporate green innovation,increase economic and environmental benefits.