As the continuous changes in environmental regulations have a non-negligible impact on the innovation activities of micro subjects, and economic policy uncertainty has become one of the important influencing factors to be considered in the development of enterprises. Therefore, based on the panel data of Chinese high-tech enterprises from 2012–2017, this paper explores the impact of heterogeneous environmental regulations on firms' green innovation from the perspective of economic policy uncertainty as a moderating variable. The empirical results show that, first, market-incentivized environmental regulation instruments have an inverted U-shaped relationship with innovation output, while voluntary environmental regulation produces a significant positive impact. Second, the U-shaped relationship between market-based environmental regulation and innovation output becomes more pronounced when economic policy uncertainty is high. However, it plays a negative moderating role in regulating the relationship between voluntary-based environmental regulation and innovation output. This paper not only illustrates the process of technological innovation by revealing the intrinsic mechanism of environmental regulation on firm innovation, but also provides insights for government in environmental governance from the perspective of economic policy uncertainty as well.
In the current era of Industrial 4.0, open innovation, and the sharing economy, innovation ecosystems are formed through government-industry-university (triple helix) interaction. The concept of responsible innovation has emerged to explore how innovation can be conducted in a transparent, trustworthy, and sustainable way so as to respond to the public interest. While current literature provides a conceptual framework, details of how responsible innovation can be formed, developed, and sustained in the sharing economy, in particular in developing countries, have been under-explored. This paper aims to explore factors of responsible innovation, linking dimensions with business practice, and identify the dynamic stages of the industry life cycle. Through an in-depth case study of China's shared bicycle industry and the firm Hellobike, this paper has prioritized factors which lead to responsibility, such as user safety and friendliness in product design, real-time operations combined with big data, collaboration between industry and local government for industry standardization, and user credit systems. It has enriched key dimensions based on literature and case studies and proposed dynamic interaction models for industry, government, users, and universities at different stages of responsible innovation in the shared bicycle sector. From this empirical study, future research areas have been identified.
PurposeResearch has found that the effects of directly experiencing mistreatment at work are consistently negative; however, results from studies examining employees' reactions to witnessing mistreatment are less consistent. This study focuses on nurses witnessing patient mistreatment in order to examine how third parties respond when witnessing patients mistreating co-workers. We argue that nurses high on other-orientation are less likely to experience emotion exhaustion in the face of witnessing patient mistreatment, whereas nurses high on self-concern are more likely to experience emotional exhaustion. We further argue that the indirect effect of witnessing patient mistreatment on job performance through emotional exhaustion is moderated by other-orientation and self-concern.Design/methodology/approachWe used data collected at two time points, with six months apart, from 287 nurses working in a hospital. The study tests the hypotheses by using multiple regression analyses.FindingsEmotional exhaustion mediated the relationships between witnessing patient mistreatment and two forms of job performance: patient care behaviors and counterproductive work behaviors. Furthermore, other-orientation moderated these indirect relationships such that the indirect relationships were weaker when other-orientation was high (vs. low). Self-concern did not moderate these relationships.Practical implicationsService and care-oriented businesses may protect their employees from the risk of burnout by promoting prosocial orientation among their patient and customer-facing employees.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the literature by demonstrating the detrimental effects of witnessing patient mistreatment on nurses' performance. It also extends the current understanding of why and when witnessing patient mistreatment is related to performance by demonstrating the joint effects of witnessing patient mistreatment and an individual difference construct, other-orientation on employees' performance.
We conducted 2 studies to investigate the role of psychological distance in the assessment of degree of severity of water pollution. In Study 1, 132 participants evaluated the severity of water pollution with 3 dimensions of psychological distance, that is, temporal, social, and probability, each comprising 3 levels. Results showed that temporal distance did not have a significant influence on the assessment of the severity of water pollution, whereas probability and social distance did. In Study 2, 146 participants evaluated the severity of water pollution in three 2 × 2 designs and one 2 × 2 × 2 design. Results demonstrated that, when the 3 psychological distances coexisted, the main effect of probability distance on severity assessment was significant, but neither temporal nor social distance had a significant effect.
Public health issues are a global focus, but recent research on the links between fossil energy consumption, pollutant emissions, and public health in different regions have presented inconsistent conclusions. In order to quantify the effect of fossil energy use and pollutant emissions on public health from the global perspective, this paper investigates 33 countries with high GDP and fossil energy consumption from 1995 to 2015 using a fixed effect model. Further, this paper utilizes heterogeneity analysis to characterize the disparity of countries with different features. Empirical results indicate that total fossil energy consumption is beneficial to the life expectancy of the population (LEP), but pollutant emissions (PM10 concentration and greenhouse gas scale) have a negative effect on LEP. Moreover, the heterogeneity test indicates that pollutant emissions lowers LEP in net energy importers more than in net energy exporters, and the effect of such emissions in low- and middle-income countries on public health is more harmful than that in high-income countries. These findings suggest that it is a greater priority for governments to strengthen the control of pollutant emissions through enhancing the efficiency of energy consumption, rather than by reducing its scale of use in low- and middle-income, and net energy importing countries. Additionally, governments also need to focus on the volatility of pollutant emissions in high-income countries with necessary control measures.