Environmental Regulation, Green Innovation, and Corporate Brand Value

Under the background of green development and brand building, this article aims to explore the relationship between environmental regulation on corporate brand value and the mediating effect of green innovation, which can help enterprises build a synergistic mechanism between brand building and green development, and step into a benign track of high-quality development. Based on institutional theory and resource-based theory, this paper takes the 106 listed companies on the 2018–2022 consecutive list of China’s 500 Most Valuable Brands as a sample and constructs a two-way fixed-effects model to test the impact of heterogeneous environmental regulations on green innovation and corporate brand value. The empirical results showed that: (1) Command-based environmental regulation exhibits an inverted U-shaped relationship with brand value, as it compels enterprises to adopt environmental governance in the short term but gradually erodes productive resources and triggers negative environmental and reputational effects over the long term; market-based environmental regulation demonstrates a U-shaped relationship with brand value: while it crowds out production funds and shifts costs to consumers in the short term, the government’s “resource compensation” effects ultimately outweigh “compliance cost” pressures in the long run; (2) green innovation plays a partial mediating role in the impact of command-based environmental regulation on corporate brand value; (3) the impact of environmental regulations on corporate brand value is heterogeneous in terms of the nature of corporate ownership, life cycle, and location. The above findings provide a useful reference for the government to use environmental regulation tools flexibly, optimally adjust the environmental regulatory mechanism, and promote corporate brand building and green development.