Research on the heterogeneous impact of carbon emission reduction policy on R&D investment intensity: From the perspective of enterprise's ownership structure

Abstract Confronted with the constraints of carbon dioxide reduction, R&D improves the production efficiency of enterprises. However, China's diversified economic entity structure makes enterprises with different attributes exhibit different R&D behaviors under the constraints of external carbon dioxide reduction. This paper takes Ten Thousand Enterprises Plan as an example, which belongs to the front-end policy and restricts the enterprise's carbon emission rights, reveals the impact of carbon dioxide reduction constraint on enterprises' R&D investment and alleviates the endogenous bias of previous research. Moreover, this paper explores the moderating effect of ownership structure on the relationship between carbon dioxide reduction policy and enterprises' R&D investment. The results show that the relationship between carbon reduction policy and enterprises' R&D investment in China is manifested as a significant “cost effect”, that is, mandatory carbon emission reduction policy limits the expansion of enterprises' R&D investment scale. Comparing state-owned enterprises with non-state-owned enterprises, carbon dioxide reduction policy can hardly stimulate the R&D investment in non-state-owned enterprises, while the state-owned enterprises can easily obtain factor resources, which decreases carbon emission reduction costs and improve R&D investment intention, resulting in stronger R&D behaviors.