The Impact of Carbon Emissions Trading Policy on Green Technology Innovation: Evidence from China’s A-Share Listed Firms

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-825-2_46How to use a DOI?

Keywords

ETS; Green technology innovation; Regulated firms; DID

Abstract

By setting against China’s carbon neutrality goal, this paper examines if carbon emissions trading policy (ETS) promotes green technology innovation among regulated firms, and investigates underlying mechanisms. Using an unbalanced panel of 4,965 firms and 46,744 firm-year data points drawn from listed A-share companies in China during 2010–2024, we manually identify firms subject to carbon allowance management and employ a multi-period difference-in-differences approach to estimate policy effect. The results show that ETS significantly promotes firms’ green technology innovation. Further analysis shows that this effect is mainly caused by substantive green technology innovation, as reflected in applications for green invention patents; for strategic green technology innovation, captured by applications for green utility model patents, the estimated effect does not reach statistical significance. Robustness checks based on event-study analysis, placebo tests, PSM-DID, alternative measures, and alternative estimation specifications support the baseline findings. Mechanism discussion suggests that carbon emissions trading stimulates green technology innovation by raising research and development R&D intensity and easing financial pressure. These findings suggest that a well-designed carbon market generates both environmental and technological benefits with micro evidence for strengthening carbon market development and innovation-oriented environmental regulation in China.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Meihong Meng
AU  - Tiansen Liu
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/11/10
TI  - The Impact of Carbon Emissions Trading Policy on Green Technology Innovation: Evidence from China’s A-Share Listed Firms
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 5th International Conference on Public Service, Economic Management and Sustainable Development (PESD 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 472
EP  - 479
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-825-2_46
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-825-2_46
ID  - Meng2026
ER  -