Do public environmental concerns promote new energy enterprises' development? Evidence from a quasi-natural experiment

Yan Gu, Kung-Cheng Ho, Senmao Xia, Cheng Yan

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29 Citations (Scopus)
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Abstract

We examine whether the public environmental concerns promote the development of new energy enterprises through a quasi-experiment China's extreme event of 2011 when the PM2.5 Surge incident escalated public environmental concerns. After this incident, the market power of new energy enterprises in severely polluted regions became 108% higher than that in the mildly polluted regions. It implies that public environmental concerns promote the development of new energy enterprises. This observation is limited to non-state-owned companies, companies without political connections, and regions without new energy subsidies. This increased market power of new energy enterprises with increasing public environmental concerns was because of sales increase instead of reduced non-operational costs. Overall, this study answers several interesting questions associated with the increasing public environmental concerns and the rapid development of energy enterprises.
Original languageEnglish
Article number105967
Number of pages11
JournalEnergy Economics
Volume109
Early online date23 Mar 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - May 2022

Bibliographical note

© 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Funder

This work is supported by Soft Science Research Project of Shanghai Science and Technology Innovation Action Plan Grant No. 22692193300 , and National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 72121002 .

Funding

FundersFunder number
Shanghai Science and Technology Innovation Action Plan22692193300
National Natural Science Foundation of China72121002

    Keywords

    • Extreme event
    • Market power
    • New energy enterprises
    • PM surge
    • Public environmental concern

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Economics and Econometrics
    • General Energy

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