Environmental Regulation and Green Innovation in China: A Systematic Approach Using Specification Curve Analysis
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2024-07-08
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en
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This study investigates the influence of researcher degrees of freedom on environmental regulation and green innovation results of polluting firms in China. To address the dual responsibility of developing its economy while protecting its environment and citizens' health, China implemented the Ambient Air Quality Standard (2012), an environmental information disclosure policy, to promote green innovation. To analyse the impact of environmental regulations, researchers have to make specification choices in model formulation and data analysis. These choices come with researcher degrees of freedom, referring to the inherent flexibility in the scientific process, which might influence studies' findings. It is important to explore the researcher degrees of freedom and to document the specification choices to increase research transparency. This study contributes theoretically and methodologically to literature by performing a Specification Curve Analysis (SCA), a novel method that exhaustively implements and reports different model specifications on the impact of implementing the Ambient Air Quality Standard (2012) on green innovation in China. The findings suggest that firms' green innovation is mostly improved in pilot cities compared to those in non-pilot cities. This study illustrates that the SCA improves research transparency and reproducibility, ultimately enhancing the credibility of results and contributing to scientific research goals.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen