Investigating environmental regulation effects on technological innovation: A meta-regression analysis

The relationship between environmental regulation (ER) and any associated innovative technologies has been studied in the previous decades; however, the estimated results have varied with no obvious consensus. To analyse what drives the different estimates in existing studies, we investigated the regulation–innovation relationship through a meta-analysis of 1276 estimates reported in 49 studies. In our analysis, 41 aspects of study design were controlled, Bayesian model averaging (BMA), and frequentist model averaging (FMA) methods were used to address model uncertainty problems. Our results suggested that controlling resources and ignoring endogeneity problems both played robust and methodical roles in explaining the differences in individual study results. Additionally, our results also indicated that five factors (middle year, publication year, usage of province-level data, linear model function, and the difference-in-differences (DID) model) consistently explained the differences in the reported estimates. We found that the ER had almost zero influence on technical innovation; more than one flexible policy instrument was required to trigger innovative activities among firms and sectors.