Research On Earnings Persistence And Firms’ Green Technological Innovation

Over the past 40 years of reform and opening up,China has made remarkable achievements in its economic development.However,in recent years,the contradiction between environmental pollution and economic development has become more and more obvious.How to balance the relationship between economic growth and environmental governance has become an urgent problem for China’s high-quality economic development.Therefore,promoting green development and building a "market-oriented green technology innovation system" to realize green technology innovation has become the core of the theoretical and practical exploration of highquality economic development in our country at present and in the coming years.As an important carrier linking macroeconomics and microtechnology,enterprises are important subjects to promote green development and implement green technology innovation.However,due to the high risk,high investment and positive externality of green technology innovation,the motivation of green technology innovation is insufficient and the conversion rate is low.Therefore,how to better stimulate enterprises to carry out green technological innovation and achieve win-win environmental and economic benefits has become an important issue in both theoretical and practical fields.Earnings persistence,as an important proxy of earnings quality,has signal transmission effect on the one hand and corporate governance function on the other,which must influence investment decision of enterprises.Therefore,it is of great reference significance to study the sustainability of enterprise earnings as the influencing factor of green technology innovation,not only for the sustainable development of enterprises themselves,but also for the information users of capital market and the high-quality development of our economy.Based on this,this paper focuses on the earnings persistence from an internal perspective,adopts a combination of theoretical and empirical methods,and takes the A-share listed companies in China from 2010 to 2020 as a sample to study the impact of corporate earnings persistence on corporate green technology innovation.The study found that:(1)the earnings persistence can promote enterprise green innovation behavior,especially in the promotion of substantive green technology innovation;(2)Mechanism analysis shows that relieving financing constraints,reducing agency costs and increasing R&D investment are important mechanisms for promoting green technological innovation in enterprises.(3)Heterogeneity analysis at the enterprise characteristic level shows that the effect of earnings persistence in promoting enterprise green technology innovation is more obvious in state-owned enterprises and enterprises with high quality of internal control;(4)Heterogeneity analysis at the level of external environment characteristics shows that when enterprises are faced with strong environmental regulation,earnings persistence plays a stronger role in promoting green technological innovation;Environmental uncertainty also inhibits the effect of earnings persistence on the promotion of green technology innovation in enterprises.The degree of market competition reinforces the effect of earnings persistence on the promotion of green technology innovation,especially strategic green technology innovation.(5)In addition,the test of the economic consequences of green technology innovation shows that green technology innovation can not only improve the environmental performance of enterprises,but also promote the economic performance of enterprises,and achieve win-win environmental and economic benefits.The main contribution of this paper lies in: first,under the background of changing the development mode,setting up the green development idea and constructing the green technology innovation system,the enterprise,as the main body of green technology innovation in a country,discusses how to stimulate the green technology innovation of the enterprise from its own internal perspective,which is very practical to promote the green development of our country’s economy;Secondly,the current research on green technology innovation focuses on external factors,mainly around government environmental regulation,media opinion,market needs,etc..Based on the internal factors,the research focuses on R&D investment,enterprise size,financing structure,board governance,etc.,and lacks the perspective of internal capital resources and the combination of internal economic factors and external policy system.Thirdly,the previous researches on earnings persistence mainly calculate earnings persistence by first order linear regression,but mainly focus on influencing factors and lack of research on its economic consequences.This paper calculates the corresponding earnings persistence index through the rolling regression of enterprise-level data,and discusses whether earnings persistence,as an important proxy of earnings quality,has "resource effect","signal transmission effect" and "corporate governance function".This not only enriches and supplements the relevant research on the economic consequences of earnings persistence,but also enriches the measurement method of earnings persistence.