Pressure or benefits? A multidimensional heterogeneity perspective on the role of environmental self-regulation in firms’ resource acquisition

ISO14001 certification, as an innovative environmental self-regulation, has been widely utilized to facilitate relevant firms to implement low-carbon technologies and mitigate environmental impacts. Although ISO14001 certification has gained much attention from researchers and practitioners, its firm-level impact is underexplored. Given that, building on stakeholder theory and resource dependence theory, this study develops a theoretical framework to explain the relationship between ISO14001 certification and firms’ resource acquisition. The roles of ownership types, ISO9001 certification, and industry competition are then investigated. With a sample of Chinese listed firms from 2006 to 2018, we track their use of ISO14001 certification and then employ a fixed-effect model to conduct the empirical analysis. To address endogeneity bias, we further utilize the propensity score matching method on the empirical model. The empirical results demonstrate that ISO14001 certification has a significant and positive effect on firms’ resource acquisition including government subsidy, bank credit, and client relationship. The results also indicate that the positive association between ISO14001 certification and government subsidy is stronger in nonstate-owned enterprises than that in state-owned enterprises. Moreover, ISO9001 certification is conducive to weakening the positive association between ISO14001 certification and both government subsidy and client relationship. In addition, industry competition enhances the impacts of ISO14001 certification on the three aspects of firms’ resource acquisition. This study provides a deeper understanding of the firms’ motivations to implement environmental self-regulation from the perspective of resource acquisition and exchange based upon stakeholder theory, as well as offering practical implications for firms’ implementation of ISO14001 certification to complement traditional regulatory instruments.