Empirical Analysis of Renewable Energy Subsidy Policies on Regional Employment and Growth

Against the global backdrop of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals, renewable energy subsidy policies worldwide are shifting from universal, tariff-based schemes toward targeted, market-oriented mechanisms. However, existing research remains divided on the incentive effects of subsidies on firm investment and the risk of resource misallocation, and few studies have established a clear micro-macro linkage between firm-level subsidy receipts and regional employment and growth outcomes. Taking China’s 2016 renewable energy subsidy reform—characterized by competitive project bidding and green certificate trading—as a quasi-natural experiment, this study constructs a two-layer panel dataset covering 286 A-share listed renewable energy firms (2010–2023, 2412 firm-year observations) and 30 provincial-level regions in China (2010–2023, 420 region-year observations). Employing difference-in-differences (DID), triple difference-in-differences (DDD), mediation effect models, and threshold regression, combined with instrumental variables and placebo tests to address endogeneity, we empirically examine how subsidy policies transmit from firm behavior to regional employment and economic growth. The results indicate that the 2016 reform significantly boosted regional employment (elasticity = 0.035, p < 0.01) and economic growth (elasticity = 0.031, p < 0.05) in treated provinces. At the firm level, subsidy intensity exhibits an inverted U-shaped relationship with investment efficiency, with an estimated inflection point at 8.3% of operating revenue within the sample. Mechanism analysis shows that easing financing constraints, stimulating technological innovation, and reducing operational risk serve as core transmission channels, with the strongest contribution from financing constraint alleviation. Heterogeneity analysis further finds larger effects for private firms, high-tech enterprises, and coastal regions. This study develops a nonlinear analytical framework of “subsidy intensity–firm behavior–regional outcomes”, identifies context-specific boundaries of subsidy effectiveness, and provides integrated micro-macro empirical evidence for optimizing subsidy policies and advancing the global energy transition.