Untangling the Relationship Between Corporate Political Ties and Low-Carbon Innovation: The Moderating Roles of Prominence and Favorability
研究企业政治关系对低碳创新的U型影响，发现企业声誉（突出性和好感度）会增强这种曲线关系，基于中国3425家企业2009-2018年面板数据。
The current literature has yet to reach a full consensus on the influence of corporate political ties (PT) on firm-level low-carbon innovation (LCI). At one extreme, some literature argues that PT can improve access to government-controlled material innovation resources and provide firms with privileged information on existing or forthcoming innovation policies, thus facilitating LCI. At the other end of the spectrum, others suggest that businesses with PT may be vulnerable to rent-seeking activities and suffer reduced autonomy in innovation decision-making, which appears detrimental to LCI. To reconcile the debate, this study fused and extended insights drawing upon the combination of resource dependence, rent-seeking, and legitimacy theories and reasoned that both propositions may be correct over some range. As expected, we found that PT will exert a U-shaped effect on LCI. Also, it revealed that two facets of corporate reputation, namely, corporate prominence (i.e., <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">being known</i> ) and generalized favorability (i.e., <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">being liked</i> ), can enhance the curvilinear relationship. By collecting and analyzing a longitudinal panel dataset of 3425 firms from 2009 to 2018 drawn from China—the largest emerging market economy and the biggest carbon dioxide emitter in the world, strong evidence was found for our theoretical arguments and empirical hypotheses. Our study contributes to the literature on the curvilinear effects of political capital, the reputational contingency of PT, and more broadly, the relationship between corporate political activities and corporate environmental performance. Finally, our findings survived a series of rigorous robustness checks.