The Impact of Market and Non-Market-Based Environmental Policy Instruments on Firms’ Sustainable Technological Innovation: Evidence from Chinese Firms

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you very much for providing me the opportunity to read your article " The impact of market and non-market-based environmental policy instruments on firms’ sustainable technological innovation: Evidence from Chinese firms " submitted for potential consideration for publication in the Sustainability. In fact, your contribution is already developed, and I would like to applaud you to its current quality level. I only have a few comments.

 

1.     Firm’s sustainable technological innovation (STI) is an important variable in the paper, but the paper does not give a clearly definition or explanations, such as distinguished from Firm’s technological innovation (TI), sustainable innovation (SI), sustainable green technological innovation (SGTI).

2.     The paper uses the combination of market and non- market-based EP instruments. As we know, EP instruments are rich to carry out in the practice, including in market and non- market-based EP instruments, the paper does not mention why Environment protection tax is selected as one of market-based EP instruments while Environment protection investment is selected as one of non-market-based EP instruments. In other word, if we change them to the other EP instruments, the paper still reaches the same conclusions in the paper?

3.     The paper considers many control variables, except “industry”. Because some firms in the industry have serious pollution, the others have not much pollution.

4.     In Line 308, (?)min?_j, what does (D) mean? Please add the explanations.

5.     Technical executive is the moderating variable, please consider whether the CEO or General manager with technical background is more significant, because the CEO or General manager in the TMT is decision-maker with more power.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

- a more extensive literature review

- a more structured presentation of data (time/period, data collection etc.)

- a more extensive policy implications section (and inclusion of contribution to fundamental theory)

- a more extensive presentation of study results: validation/invalidation of literature review

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The article presents a well-articulated argument on the importance of Sustainable Technological Innovation (STI) for firms to address the pressing global issues of climate change and resource constraints. It highlights the role of government in encouraging firms to adopt sustainable innovation through well-designed and flexible Environmental Policy (EP) measures.  However, it would be beneficial to further elaborate on the data analysis and its results to strengthen the conclusion.

1. Regarding the hypothesis H3a and H3b, the author believes that the executives with a technology background may influence the company's response to EPT and EPI, and thus the hypothesis assumes that they may be less influenced by EPT than EPI. After reading the hypothesis derivation in Section 2.3 of the article, I understand that TMT teams with a technical background will impact the company's reaction to EPT and EPI, but the extent of the impact was not strongly indicated in the derivation process and lacks a certain level of persuasiveness. It is suggested that the author supplement stronger evidence to present hypotheses H3a and H3b.

2. Line 66-67 require a reference to add theoretical support: 

“In recent years, however, single use of non-market-based EP tool has proved to be unsustainable and only short-term effective. ”

3. In this article, the author only considered the positive and negative effects that EPT and EPI may produce, and it is suggested that the author can consider "how the two instruments can be configured to achieve better firm’s STI" in future research.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

Thank you for the opportunity to read and review the paper titled The impact of market and non-market-based environmental policy instruments on firms’ sustainable technological innovation: Evidence from Chinese firms. The research question is important for international debate, and what it is worth mentioning that the investigated relationships are difficult to measure and crate a challenge for academics and practitioners.

However, the article suffers from limitations that makes it not acceptable in a present form. 

The research gap to be covered is weakly  developed in the introduction. From lines from 27 to there are a lot of general information on  policy  instruments in China without literature background.  So, the research gap needs to be developed  more deeply.  Although the text is long   the scope of the paper should be more clearly specify. 

The section titled "The effect of EP instruments on firms’ STI" should provide stronger hypothesis development (only line from 141-151 clarify the research gap in details). 

Section "Method" should be named methodology and research design or similarly to that. It contains not only methods but also measures of variables. 

In the model (table 2) is probably a lack of dot ( 1405.***)

Conclusion: the work is unbalanced. The conclusion section is very developed but the paper does not contain a discussion section. From this reason, it is hard to find he contribution to international scholarship.

Although, authors indicate limitations of the research which is based on Chinees firms but how do these finding help companies from other part of the world  to achieve better sustainable technological innovation? 

minor mistakes: STI. It was measured it is better to write "STI was measured".

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf