Environmental Regulation, Tenure Length of Officials, and Green Innovation of Enterprises

Many developing countries including China are implementing increasingly stringent environmental regulations to achieve sustainable development. However, we have limited understanding about whether environmental regulations promote enterprise green innovation. To address this research gap, this study empirically analyzes the impact of environmental regulations, which is represented by the China Environmental Protection Law (2015), on enterprise green innovation, and it explores the moderating effects of official tenure on environmental regulations and corporate green innovation. The Super-Slacks-based Measure (Super-SBM) model and multiple nonlinear regression model are employed to analyze sample data of 3557 firms in China’s A-share market during the 2014–2017 period. Our results show that, in general, a higher intensity of environmental regulations is more beneficial to incentivize enterprises to implement green innovation. Meanwhile, there is an inverted U-type relationship between the tenure length of officials and green innovation of enterprises. Furthermore, the tenure length of officials plays an inverted U-shaped role in regulating the impact of environmental regulations on enterprise green innovation. Overall, this study can help us better understand the politics behind enterprises green innovation in countries like China.