Tax Incentives, Environmental Regulation and Corporate Green Technology Innovation: Evidence Based on a Quasi-natural Experiment

Market failures hinder green technology innovation. This study investigates whether government tax policies incentivize enterprises to pursue green innovation. Leveraging a quasi-natural experiment based on the accelerated depreciation policy for fixed assets and using data from A-share listed firms (2011–2021), we employ a difference-in-differences approach to assess the policy's impact. The findings reveal that: (1) accelerated depreciation significantly enhances corporate green innovation; (2) the effect is more pronounced for state-owned enterprises than for private firms; (3) environmental regulation amplifies the positive impact of accelerated depreciation on green innovation; (4) the policy promotes green innovation through three mechanisms: alleviating financial constraints, increasing environmental investment, and mitigating managerial agency problems. Robustness checks, including parallel trend analysis, placebo tests, and alternative explanatory variables, confirm these results.