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As the largest carbon emitter in the world, China is confronted with great challenges of mitigating carbon emissions, especially from its construction industry. Yet, the understanding of carbon emissions in the construction industry remains limited. As one of the first few attempts, this paper contributes to the literature by identifying the determinants of carbon emissions in the Chinese construction industry from the perspective of spatial spillover effects. A panel dataset of 30 provinces or municipalities from 2005 to 2015 was used for the analysis. We found that there is a significant and positive spatial autocorrelation of carbon emissions. The local Moran’s I showed local agglomeration characteristics of H-H (high-high) and L-L (low-low). The indicators of population density, economic growth, energy structure, and industrial structure had either direct or indirect effects on carbon emissions. In particular, we found that low-carbon technology innovation significantly reduces carbon emissions, both in local and neighboring regions. We also found that the industry agglomeration significantly increases carbon emissions in the local regions. Our results imply that the Chinese government can reduce carbon emissions by encouraging low-carbon technology innovations. Meanwhile, our results also highlight the negative environmental impacts of the current policies to promote industry agglomeration.

The construction of pilot zones for green finance reform and innovations (GFRI) is an important initiative for the Chinese government to develop a green economy. Based on 3236 A-share listed enterprises from 2011 to 2018, this paper uses the difference-in-differences method (DID) to examine whether GFRI can promote enterprise green technology innovation. The results show that GFRI can significantly enhance enterprise green technology innovation. This conclusion is still robust after the parallel trend test, PSM-DID and placebo inspection. The mechanism research shows that GFRI can relocate the internal and external financing constraints, and then promote enterprise green technology innovation. Further, heterogeneity analysis shows that GFRI’s green technological innovation incentives only exist in the eastern region and non-state-owned enterprises, which not only significantly improves the total green technology patents, but also significantly improves the green invention patents and green practical patents. For the central and western regions and state-owned enterprises, GFRI can only enhance the green invention patents. From the perspective of enterprise green technology innovation, this paper assesses the implementation effect of GFRI, providing theoretical support and empirical evidence for green finance policies to serve China’s green economy.

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