Professor Ning Zhang published a paper in Ecological Economics

Professor Ning Zhang recently published "How does environmental regulation promote green technology innovation? Evidence from China’s total emission control policy" in Ecological Economics. The first author of this study is Prof. Zheming Yan from Xi'an Jiaotong University, with Prof. Ning Zhang as the corresponding author.
Whether environmental regulation incentivizes green technology innovations is debated in the literature. The potential endogeneity of environmental regulation is the major empirical challenge for identifying the causal effect of environmental regulation on green technology innovations. To address this issue, the study uses the quasinatural experiment of China's Total Emission Control Policy as exogenous shocks of environmental regulation. Specifically, the researchers construct a new dataset of the city-level emission reduction mandates and employ the differencein-difference-in-differences estimation to explore how stringency of environmental regulation affects green technology innovations. The empirical results show that environmental regulation promotes green innovations. Further mechanism analysis shows environmental regulation can attract "new entrants" to join the green technology market and launch more green innovations. The paper further explores the significance of environmental regulation in narrowing the gap between green and non-green technologies.

This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant nos. 72003145, 72074184, 72033005, and 72173133), the Major Grant in National Social Sciences of China (Grant nos. 23VRC037, and 2018YFC0213600), Shaanxi Province Innovation Capability Support Plan (Grant no. 2018YFC0213600, and 2024ZC-YBXM-051), and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant nos. 2020M683437; 2023T160519).
Original article link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2024.108137