Search results

This paper aims to investigate and formulate several business models (BM) for various energy communities (EC) members: prosumers, storage facilities, electric vehicle (EV) charging stations, aggregators and local markets.

One of the flexibility drivers is triggered by avoiding the cost and maximizing value that consists of delivering a service such as increasing generation or reducing consumption when it is valued most. The transition to greener economies led to the emergence of aggregators that aggregate bits of flexibility and handle the interest of their providers, e.g. small entities such as consumers, prosumers and other small service providers. On one hand, the research method consists of formulating six BM and implementing a BM that includes several consumers and an aggregator, namely, scheduling the household electricity consumption (downstream) and using flexibility to obtain revenue or avoid the cost. This is usually performed by reducing or shifting the consumption from peak to off-peak hours when the energy is cheaper. Thus, the role of aggregators in EC is significant as they intermediate small-scale energy threads and large entities' requirements, such as grid operators or retailers. On the other hand, in the proposed BM, the aggregators' strategy (upstream) will be to minimize the cost of electricity procurement using consumers’ flexibility. They set up markets to buy flexibility that is valued as long as their costs are reduced.

Interesting insights are revealed, such as when the flexibility price doubles, the deficit coverage increases from 62% to 91% and both parties, consumers and retailers obtain financial benefits from the local market.

One of the limitations of using the potential of flexibility is related to the high costs that are necessary to implement direct load control. Another issue is related to the data privacy aspects related to the breakdown of electricity consumption. Furthermore, data availability for scientific research is limited. However, this study expects that new BM for various EC members will emerge in the future largely depending on Information Communications and Technology developments.

An implementation of a local flexibility market (LFM) using 114 apartments with flexible loads is proposed, demonstrating the gains obtained from trading flexibility. For LFM simulation, this study considers exemplifying a BM using 114 apartments located in a multi-apartment building representing a small urban EC situated in the New England region in North America. Open data recorded in 2016 is provided by UMassTraceRepository.

As a novelty, six BM are proposed considering a bottom-up approach and including various EC members.

Driven by the dual-carbon target and the widespread digital transformation, leveraging digital technology (DT) to facilitate sustainable, green and high-quality development in heavy-polluting industries has emerged as a pivotal and timely research focus. However, existing studies diverge in their perspectives on whether DT’s impact on green innovation is synergistic or leads to a crowding-out effect. In pursuit of optimizing the synergy between DT and green innovation, this paper aims to investigate the mechanisms that can be harnessed to render DT a more constructive force in advancing green innovation.

Drawing from the theoretical framework of resource orchestration, the authors offer a comprehensive elucidation of how DT intricately influences the green innovation efficiency of enterprises. Given the intricate interplay within the synergistic relationship between DT and green innovation, the authors use the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis method to explore diverse configurations of antecedent conditions leading to optimal solutions. This approach transcends conventional linear thinking to provide a more nuanced understanding of the complex dynamics involved.

The findings reveal that antecedent configurations fostering high green innovation efficiency actually differ across various stages. First, there are three distinct configuration patterns that can enhance the green technology research and development (R&D) efficiency of enterprises, namely, digitally driven resource integration (RI), digitally driven resource synergy (RSy) and high resource orchestration capability. Then, the authors also identify three configuration patterns that can bolster the high green achievement transfer efficiency of enterprises, including a digitally optimized resource portfolio, digitally driven RSy and efficient RI. The findings not only contribute to advancing the resource orchestration theory in the digital ecosystem but also provide empirical evidence and practical insights to support the sustainable development of green innovation.

The findings can offer valuable insights for enterprise managers, providing decision-making guidance on effectively harnessing the innovation-driven value of internal and external resources through resource restructuring, bundling and leveraging, whether with or without the support of DT.

The research findings contribute to heavy-polluting enterprises addressing the paradoxical tensions between digital transformation and resource constraints under environmental regulatory pressures. It aims to facilitate the simultaneous achievement of environmental and commercial success by enhancing their green innovation capabilities, ultimately leading to sustainability across profit and the environment.

Compared with previous literature, this research introduces a distinctive theoretical perspective, the resource orchestration view, to shed light on the paradoxical relationship on resource-occupancy between DT application and green innovation. It unveils the “black box” of how digitalization impacts green innovation efficiency from a more dynamic resource-based perspective. While most studies regard green innovation activities as a whole, this study delves into the impact of digitalization on green innovation within the distinct realms of green technology R&D and green achievement transfer, taking into account a two-stage value chain perspective. Finally, in contrast to previous literature that predominantly analyzes influence mechanisms through linear impact, the authors use configuration analysis to intricately unravel the complex influences arising from various combinatorial relationships of digitalization and resource orchestration behaviors on green innovation efficiency.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between corporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) ratings and leverage manipulation and the moderating effects of internal and external supervision.

The authors draw on a sample of Chinese non-financial A-share-listed firms from 2013 to 2020 to explore the effect of ESG ratings on leverage manipulation. Robustness and endogeneity tests confirm the validity of the regression results.

ESG ratings inhibit leverage manipulation by improving social reputation, information transparency and financing constraints. This effect is weakened by internal supervision, captured by the ratio of institutional investor ownership, and strengthened by external supervision, captured by the level of marketization. The effect is stronger in non-state-owned firms and firms in non-polluting industries. The governance dimension of ESG exhibits the strongest effect, with comprehensive environmental governance ratings and social governance ratings also suppressing leverage manipulation.

Firms should strive to cultivate environmental awareness, fulfil their social responsibilities and enhance internal governance, which may help to strengthen the firm’s sustainability orientation, mitigate opportunistic behaviours and ultimately contribute to high-quality firm development. The top managers of firms should exercise self-restraint and take the initiative to reduce leverage manipulation by establishing an appropriate governance structure and sustainable business operation system that incorporate environmental and social governance in addition to general governance.

Policymakers and regulators should formulate unified guidelines with comprehensive criteria to improve the scope and quality of ESG information disclosure and provide specific guidance on ESG practice for firms. Investors should incorporate ESG ratings into their investment decision framework to lower their portfolio risk.

This study contributes to the literature in four ways. Firstly, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is among the first to show that high ESG ratings may mitigate firms’ opportunistic behaviours. Secondly, it identifies the governance factor of leverage manipulation from the perspective of firms’ subjective sustainability orientation. Thirdly, it demonstrates that the relationship between ESG ratings and leverage manipulation varies with the level of internal and external supervision. Finally, it highlights the importance of governance in guaranteeing the other two dimensions’ roles by decomposing overall ESG.

This paper aims to empirically investigate the impact of the carbon intensity constraint policy (CICP) on green innovation.

This study takes the implementation of the CICP as a quasi-natural experiment and uses a quasi–difference-in-difference method to investigate the impact of the CICP on firm green innovation from a microeconomic perspective.

The CICP significantly limits the quality of firms’ green innovation. Among the range of green patents, the CICP distorts only patents related to CO₂ emissions. The inhibitory effect is more pronounced in non-state-owned enterprises and heavily polluting firms. R&D investment and green investor are identified as the main mechanism.

These findings provide evidence for the influence of the CICP on firm green innovation, which can guide policymakers in China and other emerging economies that prioritize carbon intensity constraint targets and the improvement of relevant auxiliary measures.

Governments and firms should have a comprehensive understanding of environmental policies and corporate behavior and need to mitigate the negative impact through a combination of measures.

This study contributes to the literature by providing additional empirical evidence regarding the two opposing sides of the ongoing debate on the positive or negative effects of CICP. It also provides new evidence on the policy effect of the CICP on firm green innovation, together with its mechanisms and heterogeneous influences.

Brazil’s regional inequality is an important topic due to the large and persistent differences in development between states and the high levels of inequality in the country. These variations in development can potentially render survey data inaccurate since the significance of capital income varies across the states. Besides, previous studies incorporating tax and national accounts data globally have mainly focused on measuring the income distribution at the country-level. This approach can limit the understanding of inequality, especially when considering large countries such as Brazil.

The methodology used to construct these estimates follows the guidelines of the Distributional National Accounts, whose core goal is to provide income distribution measures consistent with macroeconomic aggregates and harmonized across countries and time. The procedure has three main steps: first, it corrects the survey’s underrepresentation of top incomes using tax data. Then, it accounts for national income items not included in the survey or tax data, such as imputed rents and undistributed profits. Finally, it ensures that all components match the national income.

Compared to survey-based estimations, the results reveal a new angle on the state-level inequality. This study indicates that Amazonas, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo have a more concentrated income distribution. The top 1\% of earners in these states receives around 28\% of total pre-tax income, while the top 10\% receive nearly 60\%. On the other end, Amapá (AP), Acre (AC), Rondônia (RO) and Santa Catarina (SC) are the states where the income distribution is less concentrated. There were no significant changes in the income distribution across the states during the period analyzed.

This study combines survey, tax and national accounts data to construct new estimates of Brazil’s state-level income distribution from 2006 to 2019. Previous results only considered income captured in surveys, which usually misses a significant part of capital incomes. This limitation may bias comparisons as capital income has different importance across the states. The new estimates represent the income of top groups more accurately, account for the entire national income and enable to compare regional inequality levels consistently with other countries.

This study aims to focus on the resource-based faultline of a top management team (TMT) and intends to investigate the impact of TMT resource-based faultline on corporate green innovation, by indicating the environmental management as a mediator and slack resources as a moderator to understand the relationship.

Based on the empirical data of Chinese listed manufacturing companies from 2008 to 2020, this study assesses the hypotheses using an OLS model with fixed effects of time and industry.

The results indicate that TMT resource-based faultline is significantly negatively correlated with corporate green innovation. The conclusion remains valid after endogeneity tests and robustness checks. Mechanism test shows that environmental management plays a mediating role in the association between TMT resource-based faultline and corporate green innovation. Moreover, slack resources diminish the negative association between TMT resource-based faultline and corporate green innovation.

The study not only expands the theoretical understanding of the deeper motivation of TMT faultline on corporate green innovation, but also provides a practical reference for optimizing the human resource allocation of the TMT and accelerating green transformation development.

As the cost of completing a transaction, the green merger and acquisition (M&A) premium paid on mergers can influence whether the acquisition creates value or not. However, studies linking M&A premiums to firm value have had mixed results, even fewer studies have examined the effect of green M&A premiums on bidders’ firm value. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether and how green M&A premiums affect firm value in the context of China’s heavy polluters.

Using 323 deals between 2008 and 2019 among China’s heavy polluters, this paper estimates with correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis.

Green M&A premiums are negatively associated with firm value. The results are more significant when firms adopt symbolic rather than substantive corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies. Robustness and endogeneity tests corroborate the findings. The negative relation is stronger when acquiring firms have low governmental subsidy and environmental regulation, when firms have overconfident management, when firms are state-owned and when green M&A occurs locally or among provinces in the same region. This study also analyzes agency cost as an intermediary in the relationship between green M&A premium and firm value, which lends support to the agency-view hypothesis.

This study provides systemic evidence that green M&A premiums damage firm value through agency cost channel and the choice of CSR strategies from the perspective of acquirers. These findings enrich the literature on both the economic consequences of green M&A premiums and the determinants of firm value and provide a plausible explanation for mixed findings on the relationship between green M&A premiums and firm value.

A green innovation strategy is an important step for enterprises to balance economic and environmental. As the executors of strategic decisions, the attitude and capabilities of senior managers determine the effectiveness of implementing green innovation. Therefore, this paper aims to explore the relationship between executive compensation incentives and green innovation.

Based on the data of heavily polluting enterprises listed in China's A-share market from 2015 to 2020, this study constructs an OLS model with fixed effects of time and industry, and uses the mediation three-step method to verify the correlation between executive compensation incentives, innovation openness and green innovation. Meanwhile, the grouping regression was used to test the moderating effect of environmental regulation on executive compensation incentives.

The empirical results show that executive salary incentives promote green innovation and equity incentives inhibit green innovation; the openness breadth partially mediates the relationship between salary incentives, equity incentives and green innovation, while the openness depth only partially mediates the relationship between equity incentives and green innovation; and environmental regulation positively moderates executive incentives.

Due to sample selection and variable measurement, the study lacks certain generality. Therefore, future research needs to further analyze the internal factors affecting green innovation from multiple dimensions.

This study provides a new evidence for analyzing how executive compensation measures affect green innovation, and further enhances the mediating mechanism of open innovation.

This study has significant theoretical implications for examining the intra-firm factors that affect green innovation.

Even if there is a wealth of research highlighting the key role of values and cultural significance for heritage management and, defining specific interventions on built heritage, seldom the relation to their leading values and values hierarchy have been researched. How do values and interventions relate? What values trigger most and least interventions on heritage? How do these values relate and characterize interventions? And what are the values hierarchy that make the interventions on built heritage differ?

This paper conducts a systematic content analysis of 69 international doctrinal documents – mainly adopted by Council of Europe, UNESCO, and ICOMOS, during 1877 and 2021. The main aim is to reveal and compare the intervention concepts and their definitions, in relation to values. The intensity of the relationship between intervention concepts and values is determined based on the frequency of mentioned values per intervention.

There were three key findings. First, historic, social, and aesthetical values were the most referenced values in international doctrinal documents. Second, while intervention concepts revealed similar definitions and shared common leading values, their secondary values and values hierarchy, e.g. aesthetical or social values, are the ones influencing the variation on their definitions. Third, certain values show contradictory roles in the same intervention concepts from different documents, e.g. political and age values.

This paper explores a novel comparison between different interventions concepts and definitions, and the role of values. The results can contribute to support further research and practice on clarifying the identified differences.

This paper analyzes the effect of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) on firm green innovation upgrading using data on Chinese firms between 2009 and 2021.

The author adopts the staggered difference-in-difference (DID) method to estimate regressions, treating the proposal of the BRI in 2013 as a policy shock. Our analysis yields few findings.

The author yields few findings. First, the BRI can significantly promote Chinese firms green innovation upgrading. Specifically, the BRI can promote firm green innovation upgrading by 0.9%. Second, the BRI mainly promotes firms green innovation upgrading by promoting firms to increase green entrepreneurship, cooperative innovation and environmental investment. Finally, the BRI has a greater impact on the green innovation upgrading of firms in the digital industrialization industry rather than digital industry and firms with low pollution emissions rather than firms with high-pollution emissions. This research indicates that the BRI is not only an important platform for sustainable development and also an important opportunity for green entrepreneurship.

First, due to the low quality of data and the lack of detailed information on some firms' patents owned after 2018, fully applying data of all years for regression was not possible. Second, the author did not construct a theoretical model to explore the impact of the BRI on green innovation upgrading of firms from the perspective of outward foreign direct investment (OFDI), which is also the direction of future research. Finally, there are still some unexplored mechanisms of the BRI on firms green innovation upgrading, which should be further explored in the future.

First, from the micro perspective, the author measures the quality of firms' green patents, further measuring the firms' green innovation upgrading. Second, the author discusses the impact of the BRI on firm green innovation upgrading with the method of staggered DID, so that the policy effect of the BRI can be more accurately evaluated. Third, the author comprehensively analyzes the mechanism of cooperative innovation and green infrastructure investment, as well as analyzing the heterogeneity from the perspective of industry digital transformation and firm pollution emissions. Lastly, the author provides specific paths for firms to make high-quality investment from the green BRI construction.