数字经济条件下环境规制工具能否实现企业绿色技术创新的“提质增量”

以2013—2019年A股上市企业为研究对象，运用固定面板和门槛效应模型探讨不同环境规制工具对企业绿色技术创新质与量的影响，以及数字经济条件变化对企业绿色技术创新质与量及各环境规制工具绿色创新激励作用的影响，并对不同规模企业进行异质性分析。结果显示：市场型规制能够促进企业绿色技术创新质与量提升，命令型规制促进绿色技术创新数量提升，而对质量无显著影响，公众参与型规制对绿色技术创新质与量的影响尚不显著；数字经济可以促进企业绿色技术创新质与量提升，赋能市场激励型规制对绿色技术创新质与量的激励作用，强化命令型和公众参与型规制对绿色创新数量的激励作用，抑制公众参与型规制对绿色创新质量的激励作用，而对命令型规制的绿色创新质量激励作用无影响。异质性检验结果表明，环境规制工具对不同规模企业绿色创新的激励作用存在差异，大规模企业具有创新战略刚性。     

绿色研发补贴与绿色技术创新 ———迎合视角的异质效应检验

绿色研发补贴是指中央或地方政府鼓励企业从事节约资源和保护环境等绿色技术创新活动的财政补贴。在“双碳”战略和高质量发展的双重导向下,绿色研发补贴能否促进企业绿色技术创新还有待深入研究。文章以企业的迎合行为为视角,基于中国上市公司2011—2020年的面板数据,采用双向固定效应模型实证检验了绿色研发补贴对绿色技术创新数量和质量的激励效应。研究发现：①绿色研发补贴能促进企业绿色技术创新,结论经过内生性检验和稳健性检验后仍然成立;②绿色研发补贴对绿色技术创新激励存在异质效应,表现为对绿色技术创新数量的促进作用优于质量;③企业对绿色研发补贴存在迎合行为,这导致绿色研发补贴产生“强数量、弱质量”的激励异质效应;④绿色研发补贴的激励异质效应受到行业污染程度和环境规制强度的差异影响,表现为相较于重污染行业,绿色研发补贴对非重污染行业的激励效果更优,但迎合行为的存在也会导致“强数量、弱质量”的激励效应;环境规制强的地区绿色研发补贴能促进企业绿色技术创新“增量提质”,表明强规制能制约企业策略性创新的迎合行为。基于对绿色研发补贴激励效应的分析表明,政府在以绿色研发补贴激励企业绿色技术创新时,应警惕微观企业的迎合行为,优化政策工具。本研究不仅深化了绿色研发补贴的量化研究,而且识别并检验了迎合行为的扭曲效应,为完善绿色研发补贴标准的制定和发放以及推动企业高质量绿色技术创新提供了微观经验支撑和对策建议。     

环境信息披露如何影响企业创新——基于双重差分的检验

本文基于中国污染治理工作较为严峻的客观事实,结合地市级与微观企业数据并采用准自然实验法,系统识别了环境信息披露政策对企业创新的影响效应、作用机制以及异质性特征.研究发现:环境信息披露政策对企业创新有着显著促进作用,该结论在以不同指标衡量企业创新以及经过一系列稳健性检验后依旧稳健.进一步的影响机制检验结果表明,环境信息披露政策主要通过提升财务绩效与缓解融资约束等有效渠道促进企业创新.此外,环境信息披露政策影响效应在地区与企业层面存在显著差异,东部地区与环境管制较强地区企业创新受环境信息披露政策的促进程度较强,且研发强度较高企业、重污染行业所属企业以及非国有企业从政策中获益更大.     

自愿性信息披露对企业技术创新的影响路径分析

以2013—2020年我国上市公司为研究对象，实证检验自愿性信息披露对企业技术创新的影响效应及作用机制，并考察公司内外部治理因素对这一关系的调节作用。结果发现：①自愿性信息披露显著提升企业技术创新水平；②公司外部治理环境和内部治理机制影响自愿性信息披露与企业技术创新的正向关系，具体而言，市场化进程、非国有产权性质、高管股票激励能够强化自愿性信息披露对企业技术创新的促进作用，而控股股东持股、董事会结构、董事会行为、高管薪酬激励的调节作用不显著；③影响机制实证结果表明，自愿性信息披露能够缓解第一类代理问题和外部融资约束对企业技术创新的抑制作用，从而促进企业技术创新。     

环境信息披露的绿色创新激励效应

在环境问题日益严重、环境监管日益加强的背景下,越来越多的投资者开始关注企业的环境信息。本文通过切入绿色创新的研究视角,以2008—2020年沪深两市A股上市公司为样本,研究发现,环境信息披露有助于促进企业绿色创新,这一促进效应综合体现在绿色创新质量、绿色创新数量和绿色创新总量上。作用机制研究表明,环境信息披露通过外部资源效应和外部压力效应进而作用于绿色创新。结合市场调控型环境规制工具研究发现,在促进绿色创新的过程中,环境信息披露与事前引导类环境规制工具环境保护财政支出呈现互补效应、与事后惩罚类环境规制工具排污收费呈现替代效应。最后,基于宏观、中观以及微观层面的异质性分析表明,在中西部地区和市场化程度较低的地区、技术密集型行业和产品市场竞争较弱的行业、重点污染监控企业和国有企业中,环境信息披露的绿色创新激励效应更显著。     

企业会“低调”披露环境信息吗?——竞争压力下企业环保投资与环境信息披露质量关系研究

本文以2008~2012年沪深两市A股重污染行业上市公司为样本,实证检验环保投资与环境信息披露质量的相关性,并进一步分析竞争压力是否会影响企业的环境信息披露行为,研究结果表明:环保投资与环境信息披露质量正相关,企业环保投资越大,越能够传递高质量的环境信息;激烈的产品市场竞争会削弱环保投资与环境信息披露质量之间的正相关性,竞争带来的成本压力导致企业倾向于"低调"披露环境信息,以避免可能存在的"鞭打快牛"负面效应,而且这种"低调"披露行为在环境规制严格的地区更为显著。     

绿色技术创新对绿色转型的非线性影响

绿色技术创新已成为推动经济绿色转型的重要引擎，环境规制是倒逼企业进行绿色技术创新的重要手段。首先，基于非期望产出SBM模型，测算2005—2020年中国省级层面绿色全要素生产率，作为绿色转型的衡量指标；其次，引入面板回归模型，分析绿色技术创新对绿色转型的非线性影响；最后，采用门槛回归模型分别检验不同环境规制强度下，绿色技术创新对绿色转型的影响机制。结果表明，绿色技术创新与绿色转型之间存在U型关系，这一结论经过一系列稳健性检验后依然成立，并且在2012—2020年、东部和中部地区更为突出；不同类型环境规制对绿色技术创新的作用机制存在差异，侧重末端治理的投资型环境规制具有遵循成本效应，不利于绿色技术创新，而命令型环境规制超过一定门槛后，能够发挥创新补偿效应，诱发绿色技术创新，推动经济绿色转型。研究可为优化环境规制、促进绿色技术创新进而实现经济绿色转型提供经验证据。     

财政补贴对企业绿色技术创新的影响研究

财政补贴作为一种重要的宏观调控手段,对中国经济绿色可持续发展具有重要意义。文章基于2011—2020年沪深A股上市企业数据,实证检验财政补贴对企业绿色技术创新的影响机制。结果表明：财政补贴有助于提升企业绿色技术创新水平,且这一结果在经过稳健性检验后依然成立;财政补贴可通过缓解融资约束推动企业绿色技术创新;财政补贴对企业绿色技术创新的影响作用存在异质性特征,在非国有企业、高科技企业与投资者持股比例较高的企业中促进效果更强。因此,应加大绿色信贷贴息力度,降低企业绿色技术创新融资成本;加强政府财政补贴监管力度,保障企业绿色创新技术财政补贴落实;构建数字化政府财政补贴管理平台,畅通政企补贴信息对接渠道。     

基金信息披露数字化与被持股公司绿色创新

基于中国证监会要求所有基金公司在指定网站使用XBRL格式披露基金信息这一准自然实验，采用双重差分方法考察基金信息披露数字化对被持股企业绿色创新行为的影响。结果发现，基金信息披露数字化显著促进被持股企业绿色创新产出。进一步分析发现，基金信息披露数字化促进被持股企业绿色创新行为是通过提高投资者信息处理效率和发挥机构投资者的外部治理作用实现的。分组检验发现，基金信息披露数字化能够显著提升创新能力不足和创新意愿较低企业的绿色表现。结论表明，数字化转型可以有效提升资本市场服务水平，激励企业绿色发展。     

企业环境信息披露对绿色创新的影响研究——来自上市公司的证据

企业环境信息披露对于绿色创新的影响机理尚不明确。基于自愿披露理论与合法性理论,以2008—2019年沪深A股上市公司为研究样本,实证检验企业环境信息披露对绿色创新的影响效果和作用机制。研究表明：（1）企业环境信息披露显著抑制了绿色创新,说明我国上市公司在环境治理方面存在“多言寡行”的现象。（2）研发投入在企业环境信息披露抑制绿色创新的过程中发挥部分中介效应。（3）在国有企业、规模较大企业以及环境规制水平低地区的企业中,企业环境信息披露对绿色创新的抑制作用更为显著。研究成果丰富了环境信息披露的后果研究,同时为实践中提升企业环境表现提供了启示。     

Pleasure and belief in Hume's Decision Process

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to introduce explicitly pleasure and belief in what aims at being a Humean theory of decision, like the one developed in Diaye and Lapidus (2005a). Although we support the idea that Hume was in some way a hedonist – evidently different from Bentham's or Jevons' way – we lay emphasis less on continuity than on the specific kind of hedonism encountered in Hume's writings (chiefly the Treatise, the second Enquiry, the Dissertation, or some of his Essays). Such hedonism clearly contrasts to its standard modern inheritance, expressed by the relation between preferences and utility.

The reason for such a difference with the usual approach lies in the mental process that Hume puts to the fore in order to explain the way pleasure determines desires and volition. Whereas pleasure is primarily, in Hume's words, an impression of sensation, it takes place in the birth of passions as reflecting an idea of pleasure, whose “force and vivacity” is precisely a “belief”, transferred to the direct passions of desire or volition that come immediately before action. As a result, from a Humean point of view, “belief” deals with decision under risk or uncertainty, as well as with intertemporal decision and indiscrimination problems.

The latter are explored within a formal framework, and it is shown that the relation of pleasure is transformed by belief into a non-empty class of relations of desire, among which at least one is a preorder.     

Globalization,Neoliberalism and the attack on social security

Neoliberal political movements advocate privatization of public pension systems. Globalization imposes pressure on nations to conform to neoliberal policy views with respect to the design and structure of social insurance, including public pension systems. The paper begins with an investigation of the economic, ethical and ideological dimensions of the privatization debates in the U.S.; it argues that privatization advocates may be largely moved by ideology, since the other reasons advanced appear weak or unfounded. The second part discusses the history of Social Security, the purposes for its creation, and some of its economic effects. Differences between public and private pension systems are considered. A brief international comparison of some aspects of public pension system finance and benefit structures is presented. The final section considers the ethical, macroeconomic and distributional implications of privatization, prefunding and payroll tax funding, and argues for a pay as you go system financed with income taxes. In order to promote equity, economic security, community, and social cohesion, public pension systems should be universal in coverage. In order to reduce the inequality, income insecurity, and aged poverty generated by market economies, public pension systems ought to be progressive: benefit/contribution ratios should be inversely proportional to income, and progressive income taxes should finance the system. To promote economic growth, the systems should be financed on a pay-as-you-go basis, and should not be prefunded except for an emergency reserve. The fiscal policy recommendations partially depend upon the theory developed by Abba Lerner in the 1940s, and recently advanced by Wynne Godley and Randy Wray: Lerner's “principle of functional finance.”     

Neurally reconstructing expected utility

While the concept of “expected utility” informs many theories of decision making, little is known about whether and how the human brain might compute this quantity. This article reviews a series of functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) experiments designed to localize brain regions that respond in anticipation of increasing amounts of monetary incentives. These studies collectively suggest that anticipation of increasing monetary gains activates a subcortical region of the ventral striatum in a magnitude-proportional manner. This ventral striatal activation is not evident during anticipation of losses. Actual gain outcomes instead activate a region of the mesial prefrontal cortex. During anticipation of gain, ventral striatal activation is accompanied by feelings characterized by increasing arousal and positive valence. These findings affirm the role of emotion in the anticipation of incentives, and may provide an initial step towards a neural reconstruction of expected utility.     

Duplication, Growth and ‘Total Return Economics’

Maintenance consumption is an expense recovered in product prices, yet also a source of taste satisfaction which must be exhausted, rather than reinvested, from the capital affording it. This riddle is solved in the duplication rules: the cost of maintenance consumption is recovered in pay and prices, but an equal flow is exhausted from the human capital of the worker earning the pay. The rules impact tradition in several ways. If output is defined in principle as value added, then it cannot also be described as consumption plus net investment without double-counting the maintenance consumption recovered in prices. Also rate of return in the stationary state is not zero, but is the rate sufficient to offset the exhaustion of individual human capital. The rules lead to new insights into economic return, and support an argument that all growth at the scale of closure is due to productivity gain rather than to thrift.     

John Stuart Mill's Theories of Wealth and Income Distribution

Although he was much influenced by David Ricardo when he wrote the classical part of his Principles , John Stuart Mill was not a Ricardian when he penned his theories of wealth and distribution. They are based on a triple foundation. First, a belief that economics is a moral discipline. Second a theory of custom-driven human behavior. Third, an empirically formed conviction that the institutions of state, education and business cooperate to structure the distribution of income. On the basis of these presuppositions, Mill formulated 1) an institutional theory of the formation of human and non-human wealth and 2) an even more institutional theory of distribution demonstrating how the aforementioned institutions malignantly skew the distribution of income to the advantage of the propertied classes and to the extreme disadvantage of the working class. As a social economist, Mill recommended institutional reforms designed to eradicate the poverty of the working class.     

Forecasting the price of gold

This article seeks to evaluate the appropriateness of a variety of existing forecasting techniques (17 methods) at providing accurate and statistically significant forecasts for gold price. We report the results from the nine most competitive techniques. Special consideration is given to the ability of these techniques to provide forecasts which outperforms the random walk (RW) as we noticed that certain multivariate models (which included prices of silver, platinum, palladium and rhodium, besides gold) were also unable to outperform the RW in this case. Interestingly, the results show that none of the forecasting techniques are able to outperform the RW at horizons of 1 and 9 steps ahead, and on average, the exponential smoothing model is seen providing the best forecasts in terms of the lowest root mean squared error over the 24-month forecasting horizons. Moreover, we find that the univariate models used in this article are able to outperform the Bayesian autoregression and Bayesian vector autoregressive models, with exponential smoothing reporting statistically significant results in comparison with the former models, and classical autoregressive and the vector autoregressive models in most cases.     

Simulating the Effect of Regulatory Systems in a Fishery, An Application to the French Driftnet Albacore Fleet

With a thin economic component, most bio-economic models of fisheries failto assess the effects of the regulation systems on firms. In order to analysethe short term consequences of different management schemes, a simulationmodel is applied to the French driftnet albacore fleet: licence allocation withdriftnet regulation, individual quotas, and individual transferable quotaswithout any input control. Vessel technology is estimated by using the datacollected, and groups of vessels are distinguished according to criteria ofperformance. We present the adjustment within firms and between groupsunder different scenarios (limited entry with and without driftnetregulation, individual quotas and individual transferable quotas allocation),and we compare their results in terms of quasi-rent value and otherindicators such as hake harvests or dolphin by-catches.     

Knowledge as a Path-Dependence Process

By following a new approach proposed by Cognitive and Neuroeconomics, this paper presents and extends that part of Hayek's theory concerning knowledge in path-dependent terms, and shows that this is a fertile theory, opening new lines of inquiry for contemporary economics. In his theory of knowledge Hayek shows that the dynamics of economic change is path-dependent, in a different and more profound way than in the rest of the path-dependent literature. This literature deals with an important controversy, which will be also discussed and its specific and original meaning will be highlighted. As it will emerge, knowledge as a path-dependent process is consistent with cognitive theories of perception and learning and it plays a more important role than is traditionally assumed. Path-dependence is in fact always present in the cognitive dimension of perception and in individual decision-making processes, as well as in the processes of organizational innovation, and even in the macro-dimension of institutional change. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Interest on reserves and inflation

The payment of interest on reserves has been a common practice in inflationary economies. This policy may seem paradoxical since it involves returning part of the seigniorage, generated by the inflation process, with the intention to finance the fiscal deficit. This paper argues that the motivation for this policy can be captured by the discretionary regime, where the policymaker pays interest on reserves because he is concerned with the erosion of real liquidity by inflation, which is in part beyond his control. However, this policy is an unlikely outcome in the commitment regime, where the policymaker is in full control of inflation.