• Energy Research

The lower price of energy leads to higher coal consumption in China. The idea of an “environment-for-trade policy” could be used to achieve an international competitive advantage, which, in turn, has important implications. To address the issue, we develop properties to examine the link between the low price of energy and strategic environmental policy in China and investigate the choice of policy instruments in a strategic environmental policy model with vertical contracts. In addition, to contribute to the literature on strategic environmental policy, this paper also develops properties to investigate different choices of instruments for the environmental policy and includes the degree of energy marketization for the wholesale price in the study. To do so, we assume that the wholesale price of the polluting input increases with the market price. By using this assumption, this paper analyzes the effects of two instruments of the environmental policy on social welfare and concludes that there is no reason to expect both downstream and upstream firms to establish a high wholesale price. Due to the low level of marketization, when the government selects an emission tax as the policy instrument, the optimal tax rates should be higher than the marginal damage of emissions. However, the optimal resource tax is uncertain when its effect on environmental damage is taken into account. In other words, the resource tax is ineffective as a policy instrument. Our results can be used to draw some practical policies for countries to use their energy effectively. To promote energy sustainability, governments should liberate resource prices and reform the system to get efficient environmental policies.

Our research investigates the connection between firm characteristics and leverage based on a sample of firms listed in the Chinese Stock Index 300. We aim to examine the sustainability of the financial structure of Chinese enterprises covering the period 2010–2019. We employ a conditional quantile regression that discloses the behavior of regressions across the leverage distribution and compares its results for different leverage levels with those achieved by the linear regression model. The results confirm the effects of the determinants of capital structure change since the quantile of leverage varies. We find that both the trade-off theory (TOT) and the pecking order theory (POT) confirm the validity of Chinese firms’ financing decisions at different quantiles of leverage. Specifically, the empirical results support the POT more over the TOT at higher levels of the quantile. Furthermore, the relationship between firm size and leverage strongly switches to support the POT at the highest quantile. All empirical results are obtained from quantile regression, consistent with the prediction for an increase in asymmetric information of the POT when Chinese firms employ more debt in their capital structure.

The Chinese electric power industry, including its coal industry and other energy industries that are not efficient, contributes to China’s serious energy shortages and environmental contamination. The governing authority considers energy conservation to be one of the most prominent national targets, and has formulated various plans for decarbonizing the power system. Applying the trans-log cost function, this paper examined the trans-log cost function to analyze the potential inter-factor substitution among energy, capital and labor. We also investigated what role human capital played in energy substitution for the electric power sector during the period from 1981 to 2017. Three key results were derived: (1) energy is price-insensitive, (2) there exists large substitution sustainability between both capital and labor with energy, and (3) human capital input not only enhances the extent of energy substitutability with capital and labor but also is a substitute to energy itself. These findings imply that the liberalization of the electric price mechanism is conducive to lessening energy use and augmenting non-energy intensiveness, and that energy conservation technology could become more sustainable by investing more capital in the electricity sector, thereby achieving a capital–energy substitution and a decrease of CO2 emissions. We further suggest that the priority for the Chinese electric power industry should be to attach more importance to increasing human capital input.

This paper empirically examined relevant data on BRICS CO2 emissions, financial development, and economic growth in the past 40 years, and analyzed the correlation between them. Using the cointegration test, it found that there is a clear correlation between the variables in China and South Africa, which show that there is a two-way relationship between CO2 emissions, financial development, and economic growth in both countries. Using the quantile regression method in the analysis, the results demonstrated that at the 0.6th quartile, South Africa’s financial development had a negative impact on CO2 emissions, while Brazil’s CO2 emissions had a negative impact on financial development. Economic growth was subsequently added as a control variable, and the quantile-on-quantile regression method was used to test the correlation between the financial development of the BRICS countries and their CO2 emissions. Finally, based on empirical conclusions, this paper proposed that BRICS countries should focus on sustainable economic development; when government departments formulate emission-reduction policies, they must reasonably consider the relationship between financial development and emission-reduction policies.

This paper presents a model to study how climate forecasts and the agricultural production function affect the effectiveness of government policies (disaster bailouts and agricultural income tax) and agricultural insurance (both compulsory and voluntary). In the base model with a neoclassical production function, we find that these programs could increase farmers’ expected profit and reduce its volatility. Furthermore, credible climate forecasts enable farmers, insurance companies, and governments to make more informed cultivate and insurance decisions, and therefore increase the benefit of these insurance programs to farmers. The results suggest that climate forecasts, combined with agriculture policies and insurance, can play an important role in securing farmers’ profits and providing climate risk management guidance for agriculture production.