Dissecting environmental efficiency: The role of technology adoption and usage
本文分析欧盟排放交易体系下的污染工厂数据，将环境效率分解为技术采纳和使用两部分，发现改进技术使用可带来80%的效率提升，而改进技术采纳可带来75%的提升，且不同企业特征影响两种改进路径。
How could firms best reduce their environmental impact? Should they change technology? Or could they do better with what they already have? This paper shows that one size does not fit all. We analyse a sample of polluting production plants (i.e. installations) regulated under the EU Emission Trading System. We employ a mixture model estimation to dissect environmental efficiency into a technology adoption component ( w h a t type of technology is used) and a technology usage component ( h o w a technology is used). Our installation-level analysis shows that the share of installations adopting frontier technologies is about 21%. We also find that the average environmental efficiency gains that installations could reach by improving technology adoption and technology usage are 75% and 80% respectively. The analysis of balance-sheet data on parent companies reveals that better environmental technologies are adopted by larger, listed, multi-installation and international companies, while older firms and firms with higher intangible assets intensity more commonly show improved technology usage.