关键词: 环境监管, 研发投资, 挤出效应, 融资压力, 业绩压力

Abstract: With the rapid economic development, environmental pollution issues have become increasingly significant. In order to solve severe pollution issues, governments have made a vast array of environmental regulatory policies to limit pollution emissions. In China, as an important means of daily environmental supervision, the Key Emission Unit List Management Regulation aims to strengthen environmental supervision of heavily polluting enterprises and curb their polluting behaviors through vertical supervision at the central and provincial levels, as well as parallel local regulation. Currently, the impact of environmental regulations on firms’ R&D behavior has become a focus of academic attention. According to the Porter hypothesis, environmental supervision can stimulate firms’ R&D investment, while according to the view of neoclassical economists, environmental supervision will crowd out firms’ R&D investment.
Based on the Key Emission Unit List Management Regulation, this paper examines the impact of environmental supervision on corporate R&D investment and its influence mechanism using data from Chinese A-share listed companies from 2016 to 2020. The results show that the enhanced environmental supervision has a significant crowding-out effect on corporate R&D investment, including environmentally-friendly R&D investment. A series of robustness tests justify our findings. Mechanism tests indicate that financing pressure and performance pressure are two potential mechanisms by which environmental supervision crowds out corporate R&D investment. On the one hand, environmental supervision increases the financing pressure of the firm, which reduces the resources of enterprises for innovation. On the other hand, environmental supervision puts performance pressure on executives, which reduces management's willingness to innovate. The heterogeneity results reveal that the crowding-out effect of environmental regulation on corporate R&D investment is more significant in non-state-controlled enterprises, non-heavy-polluting industries, and samples with higher levels of regional environmental regulation. Further research shows that environmental regulation has negative impacts on the firm's market value.
Compared with existing studies, this paper contributes to the literature and practice in the following three aspects. First, it enriches the research on the economic consequences of macro-environmental supervision. Second, it expands the research on the impact mechanism of environmental supervision. Finally, in order to improve the environmental supervision system and guide enterprises to innovate, it puts forward corresponding policy suggestions and inspirations. Based on the above findings, it presents the following suggestions. Firstly, it is necessary for the government to stick to the concept of green development, firmly believe that innovation is the primary driving force for development, and improve supporting policies for environmental supervision. Secondly, the government should improve the innovation-oriented green credit system and guide the financial sector to strengthen support for the innovation activities of heavily polluting enterprises. Thirdly, under environmental supervision, firms should firmly believe that innovation is the source of power for firm development. Finally, firms should further improve their performance incentive mechanism and avoid short-term thinking in their incentive policies.

Key words: Environmental Supervision, R&D Investment, Crowding-out Effect, Financing Pressure, Performance Pressure