Energy regulation and industrial robot adoption: The role of human capital

IF 14.2 2区经济学 Q1 ECONOMICS Energy Economics Pub Date : 2025-05-01 Epub Date: 2025-04-15 DOI:10.1016/j.eneco.2025.108499

Chien-Chiang Lee , En-Ze Wang

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Abstract

Energy regulations play a crucial role in enhancing firms' energy efficiency and environmental performance. However, their unintended effects, particularly on the adoption of industrial robots, have received limited attention. This paper leverages the implementation of China's Top 10,000 energy-consuming enterprises (TECE) program as an exogenous shock and employs a difference-in-differences methodology to assess the impact of energy regulations on industrial robot adoption and its potential underlying mechanisms. Additionally, the study examines the moderating role of human capital in shaping this relationship. To this end, we constructed firm-level variables for industrial robot usage and the intensity of energy regulation by integrating multiple micro-level datasets. Our findings indicate that energy regulations significantly reduce the usage of industrial robots. Specifically, the TECE project decreased the probability of regulated firms adopting industrial robots by 0.09 percentage points. Given that only 2.8 % of firms in the sample period used industrial robots, this impact is considerable. The deterioration of financial performance and increased R&D investment induced by energy regulations are likely channels for this effect. Furthermore, the energy regulation's negative impact is more pronounced for firms with higher levels of human capital. This is because such firms are more inclined to increase R&D investment, thereby crowding out investment in industrial robots.

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能源监管与工业机器人采用：人力资本的作用

能源法规在提高企业能源效率和环境绩效方面发挥着至关重要的作用。然而，它们意想不到的影响，特别是对工业机器人的采用，受到的关注有限。本文利用中国耗能企业10000强（TECE）计划的实施作为外生冲击，采用差异中的差异方法评估能源法规对工业机器人采用的影响及其潜在机制。此外，该研究还考察了人力资本在形成这种关系中的调节作用。为此，我们通过整合多个微观层面的数据集，构建了工业机器人使用和能源监管强度的企业层面变量。我们的研究结果表明，能源法规显著减少了工业机器人的使用。具体来说，TECE项目将受监管企业采用工业机器人的可能性降低了0.09个百分点。考虑到样本期内只有2.8%的公司使用工业机器人，这种影响是相当大的。能源监管导致的财务绩效恶化和研发投资增加可能是这种影响的渠道。此外，能源监管对人力资本水平较高的企业的负面影响更为明显。这是因为这些公司更倾向于增加研发投资，从而挤出了对工业机器人的投资。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Energy Economics ECONOMICS-

CiteScore

18.60

自引率

12.50%

发文量

524

期刊介绍： Energy Economics is a field journal that focuses on energy economics and energy finance. It covers various themes including the exploitation, conversion, and use of energy, markets for energy commodities and derivatives, regulation and taxation, forecasting, environment and climate, international trade, development, and monetary policy. The journal welcomes contributions that utilize diverse methods such as experiments, surveys, econometrics, decomposition, simulation models, equilibrium models, optimization models, and analytical models. It publishes a combination of papers employing different methods to explore a wide range of topics. The journal's replication policy encourages the submission of replication studies, wherein researchers reproduce and extend the key results of original studies while explaining any differences. Energy Economics is indexed and abstracted in several databases including Environmental Abstracts, Fuel and Energy Abstracts, Social Sciences Citation Index, GEOBASE, Social & Behavioral Sciences, Journal of Economic Literature, INSPEC, and more.