The main objective of this paper is to study the impact of the Ambient Air Quality Standard (2012) on the green innovation of Chinese firms in polluting industries. The analysis features “leverage effect” of Porter Hypothesis imposed by environmental regulations and exploits exogenous variations caused by the promulgation of the new policy. Based on the exogenous variations, this paper uses the time varying PSM-DID method. The findings of this study suggest that the implementation of the new policy improves firms’ green innovation. Increments in R&D investment and environmental protection investment are channels through which the new standard positively affects firms’ green innovation. The cross-sectional heterogeneity analysis exhibits that the effect of this environmental regulation is stronger for firms with bigger size and lower financial constraints. The contribution and significance of this study are as follows: our study enriches understanding of the impact of environmental regulation on firms’ green innovation by empirically confirming the influencing channels of the impact of environmental regulations on green innovation. In addition, this paper contributes to the firms’ green innovation literature by empirically validating the role of corporate characteristics in moderating the effect of environmental regulations.

The importance of Information Technology (IT) in business success has been extensively studied over the past decades. In the current unpredictable business environment, success depends more heavily on the efficiency and effectiveness of new product development (NPD), which requires stronger IT support and closer internal and external collaborations. Compared with the traditional staged model of NPD, concurrent NPD (CNPD) has become a more preferred approach that companies take to develop new offerings to the market. Our study therefore aims to empirically investigate how IT capabilities can affect firm performance through CNPD and supply chain integration (SCI). Based on the resource-action-performance (RAP) framework, a survey-based quantitative approach is employed targeting at the Chinese manufacturing sector, and 205 valid responses are obtained for analysis. Entropy Weight Method and Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regressions results indicate that IT capabilities positively relate to firms’ CNPD, which then collectively improves firm performance. Further, SCI is found to mediate the effect of IT capabilities on CNPD. Our findings contribute to the NPD and supply chain management (SCM) literature by integrating the roles of IT and the strategic action of CNPD from a cooperation perspective. The study also provides timely practical insights on how IT capabilities should be leveraged to support strategic NPD actions to achieve success in fiercely competitive business environments.

This paper takes the lead in examining the non-linear links between corporate environmental investment and corporate financial performance across China. Ordinary least square (OLS) regression models are approximated using the data of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2009 to 2020. Robust test and two-stage least square (2SLS) methods are incorporated to cater for robustness and endogeneity. The research results show that corporate environmental investment has inverted U-shape impact on corporate financial performance. Furthermore, both firm risk and government subsidies moderate the inverted U-shape relationship between corporate environmental performance and corporate financial performance. These findings offer significant practical implications for businesses and Chinese government funding agencies by emphasizing the firm reputation and agency cost theories in the literature on the efficiency of corporate environmental investment.

In recent decades, sustainable development and environmental protection, especially air quality, have become key concerns for governments as well as scholars. As a typical regulation for air quality monitoring, the Ambient Air Quality Standard (AAQS) (2012) is a good attempt at balancing economic growth and environmental protection in development exploration. Therefore, this paper takes the AAQS (2012) as a quasi-natural experiment to detect its influence on the total factor productivity (TFP) of polluting firms. The results of a DID model suggest that the AAQS (2012) significantly improves the TFP of polluting firms in China even after several robust tests. Further, this paper also finds that firms in high urbanization and with over-investment experience are more sensitive to the new standard. As for the channels, the results show that air quality monitoring affects firms’ TFP by adjusting the industry concentration level and innovation capabilities. This research offers a novel perspective for decision-makers, highlighting the importance of harmonizing economic growth with environmental sustainability.