The implementation of the New Environmental Protection Law (NEPL) in 2015 is a fundamental and effective way to strengthen environmental governance in China since the original version was released in 1989.This study explores whether environmental regulations affect the green innovations of environmental enterprises in China by treating the implementation of the New Environmental Protection Law (NEPL) as a quasi-natural experiment.Using green patent data from 419 A-share listed enterprises from 2012 to 2021, we find that the implementation of the NEPL increases the number of both green invention patent applications and green utility model patent applications in environmental industries.In addition, there is an accelerating effect because of sufficient R&D investment and a crowding-out effect because of excessive government subsidies.The research results also show that green patents of state-owned enterprises, large enterprises, and enterprises located in areas with strong environmental governance are significantly increased.These findings provide theoretical and empirical basics for the authorities to formulate more targeted policies to motivate innovations in environmental enterprises.
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Zhang et al. (2024) studied this question.
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