Climate change and environmental conditions call for more attention to be paid to eco-friendly economic behavior. As a market-oriented environmental regulation, environmental tax can stimulate and guide enterprises’ environmental innovation in a neutral way. However, what elements connect the environmental tax and enterprise innovation activity together? Are all the enterprises’ innovation activities affected by the environmental tax in the same way? To answer the questions, the study uses the data of Chinese textile listed companies between 2004 and 2018 to explore the intermediary role of manpower and capital investment in the innovation chain and further analyze the influence of the heterogeneous factors such as property right, segmented industry, and region. The results show that the environmental tax can effectively promote the innovation capital input of Chinese textile enterprises, and the innovation manpower input plays a partial mediation role. At the same time, environmental tax can effectively promote the innovation performance output of Chinese textile enterprises, and innovation capital input plays a complete mediation role. In addition, heterogeneous factors such as property right, segmented industry and region will affect the relation of environmental tax to innovation input and output quality and greenness to varying degrees. The study makes a profound analysis of the relation of environmental tax on Chinese textile enterprises innovation by using the microdata at the enterprise level, providing a more targeted reference for making policies in the future.

The textile industry is a traditional pillar industry of the national economy in China. The strategic goal of Chinese innovation is to upgrade and transform traditional industries and make them develop in coordination with high-tech industries, so as to realize sustainable industrial development. At the core of industrial sustainable development, the innovation of the textile industry in China has become an important issue worthy of attention. Based on resource-based theory and signal transfer theory, the relationship between government funding, R&D models and the innovation performance of the Chinese textile industry is studied. The results show that government funding has a significant, direct promoting effect on the internal R&D and science-based cooperation of enterprises. Government funding indirectly promotes market-based cooperation through internal R&D. The promoting effect of internal R&D on innovation performance is greater than that of cooperative R&D. Internal R&D and cooperative R&D have more promoting effects on R&D reserve performance than those on market performance. Government funding indirectly promotes innovation performance through the mediation of internal R&D and science-based cooperation. The threshold effect of cooperative R&D indicates that only when the cooperative R&D intensity exceeds the threshold can government funding foster innovation performance more effectively. The conclusions can provide theoretical guidance for the formulation of innovation policy.

Sustainable innovation is an important factor for enterprises to obtain core competitiveness in modern society, and only continuous R&D investment can ensure the smooth progress of enterprise innovation. Therefore, this study uses the post-subsidy data of enterprise R&D investment released by Hangzhou Science and Technology Bureau to explore the influencing factors of R&D investment and its sustainability by Chinese high-tech enterprises. In contrast to previous research which mainly focused on the pre-subsidy, this study focuses on the post-subsidy policy of R&D investment sustainability. Empirical analysis methods, such as cross-sectional linear regression and the propensity-score-matching method, were used to draw the following conclusions: (1) The quantity and sustainability of R&D investment of enterprises are obviously unbalanced among regions. Regions where high-tech enterprises are concentrated have higher levels of R&D investment and sustainability than other regions. (2) Under different scales, there are significant differences in the amount and sustainability of R&D investment. Large enterprises have stronger R&D investment strength, while small enterprises have stronger R&D investment willingness. However, the effect of scale on R&D investment will be reduced by regional factors. (3) The evaluation of high-tech enterprises and the enterprises’ R&D investments affect each other. (4) The sustainability of enterprise R&D investment will be affected by enterprise heterogeneity factors, and in turn, the sustainability of enterprise R&D investment will also affect the amount of enterprise R&D investment. Based on the results, the study provides suggestions for the government to make more targeted policies.