Whether Environmental Targets of Local Governments Affect Enterprises Green Technology Innovation: An Empirical Study Based on the Data of Listed Companies in China's Manufacturing Industry

Based on manually collected data on energy conservation and emission reduction targets in various provinces in China from 2011 to 2017 and data on green patent applications of listed manufacturing companies, a two-way fixed effects model is used to empirically analyze the impact of government environmental targets on enterprise green technology innovation. The findings are as follows. First, the government's environmental goals inhibit the green technology innovation of enterprises, and the inhibition effect is still lagging behind. Second, the mechanism analysis shows that the government's environmental goals restrain green technology innovation in two ways: reduction in enterprise profits and increase in fixed asset investment. Third, in the eastern region and clean industries, government environmental targets have a significant inhibitory effect on the green technology innovation of enterprises while in the central and western regions and pollution-intensive industries the effect is not significant; compared with state-owned enterprises, government environmental targets have a greater restraining effect on non-state-owned enterprises' green technology innovation; government environmental targets mainly restrain the substantive green technological innovation behavior of enterprises rather than the strategic green technological innovation behavior.