Green for labor: Environmental regulation and employment of heavy polluting enterprises——Based on the green technology innovation in the whole production process

Based on the data of listed companies in China's A-share heavily polluting industries from 2008 to 2020, this paper empirically examined the impact and mechanism of environmental regulation on employment. The research found that environmental regulation adversely impacted the employment of enterprises, and this result was valid after a series of robustness tests and control of endogenous problems. However, the mechanism analysis revealed that environmental regulation could carry out green technological innovation which alleviated the contradiction between environmental protection and employment. In the heterogeneity analysis, it was found that the adverse impact of environmental regulation on enterprise employment mainly affects non-state-owned enterprises, low-educated people and enterprises in the central region. Furthermore, the research found that the changes in the production process weakened the adverse impact of environmental regulation on enterprise employment. On the contrary, the increase of R&D investment aggravated this negative impact which is not significantly affected by end-of-pipe innovation. © 2023 Chinese Society for Environmental Sciences. All rights reserved.