The Study of the Impact Mechanism of R&D Expense Super-deduction on Green Innovation of High-tech Enterprises in the Context of the Digital Economy

Abstract

As the digital economy improves by leaps and bounds, new factor conditions are provided for corporate green innovation. In the meantime, the R&D expense super-deduction policy has become a vital fiscal and tax instrument for incentivizing high-tech enterprises to conduct low-carbon technology R&D. Nevertheless, existing research rarely places the digital economy, the super-deduction policy, as well as corporate green innovation within the same framework, and analyses of transmission paths and differentiated policy effects still need improvement. Against this background, this research selects panel data of A-share listed high-tech enterprises from 2019 to 2023 as the sample, and then constructs two-way fixed effects and mediation effect models, and empirically examines the impact of the R&D expense super-deduction on green innovation of high-tech enterprises and its internal transmission mechanism. Further, Heterogeneity analysis is conducted from three dimensions: ownership nature, regional distribution, and firm size. The results suggest that the R&D expense super-deduction reinforces green innovation in high-tech enterprises, R&D intensity plays a partial mediating role in this process, and the policy incentive effect is heterogeneous, being more significant in non-state-owned, eastern-region, and small-scale high-tech enterprises. This paper supplements micro-level evidence on the intersection of fiscal and tax incentives and corporate green innovation, and provides references for the government, in order to implement differentiated tax policies and for enterprises to conduct green R&D.