Government Subsidies, Constraints on Emission Reduction Targets and Firm’s Low-carbon Strategy Selections in Industrial Sector

Industrial companies are the main contributors to carbon emissions, and their low-carbon practices play a key role in achieving national carbon reduction targets. Investigating how different types of governmental policies influence firm’s low-carbon practices would provide decision support for designing and making effective carbon abatement policies. Based on the data of energy-intensive listed industrial companies in Shandong Province, we develop partial least squares structural equation models to explores the relationship between corporate heterogeneity and their low-carbon strategies, and to examine the mediation of government low-carbon subsidies and the moderation of CO₂ emissions reduction pressure. The empirical results show that the four types industrial companies with larger scale, higher carbon emission intensity, stronger leadership ethics or the characteristics of state-owned property rights have better low-carbon performance, and prefer to choose low-carbon energy and production process strategies, and their low-carbon strategies are generally supported by government subsidies. While those companies with opposite characteristics have a lower level of low-carbon practice, and they can acquire less government low-carbon subsidies; The pressure of local government on carbon emission reduction is not the main factor affecting low-carbon strategy choice, but which has a moderation effect on a small number of choice path.