1. Introduction
For a long time, China has relied on the comparative advantage of lower labor costs and environmental costs to participate in the international division of labor, promote the expansion of production scale through continuous investment, and realize the rapid growth of economic aggregation. With the increasingly strengthened domestic environmental constraints, diminishing marginal benefits of capital accumulation, and the rising labor costs, it is difficult to support the continued rapid growth of the economy. Internationally, China’s manufacturing industry is also facing the low-end lock of the global value chain dominated by Europe and the United States. In the context of internal and external troubles, shifting economic growth to relying on total factor productivity and achieving innovative growth is the inevitable way out for the current Chinese economy. In the 2019 government work report (the government work report is a report delivered by the premier of the state council to the National People’s Congress and submitted to deputies of the National People’s Congress for deliberation) of the two sessions (NPC and CPPCC), the employment priority was raised to the level of national macro-control for the first time. Stabilizing employment is not only promoting people’s livelihood but has become an important driving force for the country’s high-quality development and the transformation of old and new growth drivers. It is necessary to rely on innovation in manufacturing to bring about high-quality economic development, and to solve the employment problem to reduce the social burden of employment, so as to achieve the dual goals of high-quality development and full employment.
The fourth industrial revolution is springing up and bringing about numerous new industries and new economic forms, which has been called the “innovation economy.” On the one hand, the innovation economy can create a large number of new jobs. On the other hand, the innovation economy has a squeezing effect on employment and brings unemployment shocks [
1]. In recent years, the rapid development of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence and robots, not only provides new impetus for economic growth, but also triggers the panic of “machines replacing people.” At present, the destructive effect of technological progress in artificial intelligence and robots on employment is limited, but the long-term employment effect is not optimistic [
2]. Some scholars are concerned about how susceptible current jobs are to these technological developments [
3], while others have explored the employment creation effects of innovation activities [
4,
5]. Moreover, relevant literatures have further studied the relationship between environmental innovation and employment creation. Horbach and Rennings [
6] examined the employment effects of environmental technologies in different fields of environmental innovation, and the empirical results show that the introduction of cleaner technologies as process innovations leads to a higher employment by improving the competitiveness of firms, but air and water process innovations that are still dominated by end of pipe technologies have a negative impact on employment. Gagliardi et al. [
7] investigated the link between environment-related innovation and job creation at the firm level. The econometric analysis shows a strong positive impact of “green” innovation (measured by the number of environment-related patents) on long-run job creation, which was substantially bigger than the effect of other innovations. Triguero et al. [
8] discussed the synergistic effect between eco-innovation and employment based on a sample of more than 6000 innovative Spanish manufacturing and service firms. The main findings show that size, research and development (R&D), and export influence eco-innovation and employment in the same direction. To sum up, more and more studies attempt to explore the potential employment effect of environmental innovation but fail to reveal the impact path of environmental regulation on technological innovation and enterprise employment.
The controversial debate on the relationship between environmental regulation and technological innovation has been going on for a long time, and most of the literature validates the innovation compensation effect of environmental regulation. Porter hypothesis holds that strict and appropriate environmental regulation can stimulate enterprises’ innovation, partially or even completely offset the cost of enterprises’ compliance with environmental regulation, and improve enterprises’ international competitiveness [
9]. On the premise of pursuing profit maximization, environmental regulation imposes additional constraints on enterprises, and enterprises may change their original behaviors and carry out innovative activities so as to reduce costs under the new constraints. Jaffe and Palmer [
10] examined the impact of environmental regulation on R&D expenditure and patent application volume by using data from the U.S. industrial sector and found that environmental regulation significantly promoted R&D expenditure but had no significant impact on patent application. Some scholars found a positive relationship between environmental regulation and patent application through empirical research on the number of environment-related patent applications [
11,
12]. Domestic scholars have found that there is a U-shaped relationship between environmental regulation intensity and technological innovation, and it can only be realized when environmental regulation intensity crosses a certain threshold value [
13,
14]. Milani [
15] found that industries that are not easily transferred will carry out more research and development activities in the face of stronger environmental regulation as an alternative to industrial relocation. It can be seen that there is no consistent conclusion regarding how environmental regulation affects technological innovation in academia, and the impact of environmental regulation on technological innovation may be related to industry characteristics.
The academic community agrees that there are two mechanisms through which environmental regulation impacts on employment: negative scale effect and positive substitution effect. The early studies mainly focused on the scale effect and argued that environmental regulation would lead to the increase of production cost and governance cost of enterprises, weaken the competitive advantage of enterprises, and then lead to the reduction of enterprise scale and the reduction of labor demand [
16]. However, when environmental regulation raises the price of resource production factors, enterprises’ productive input tends to be labor-intensive, leading to the increase of labor input factors, and thus producing a substitution effect [
17]. Therefore, the employment effect of environmental regulation depends on the size of the scale and substitution effects. With the deepening of research, scholars have found that the impact of environmental regulation on employment presents different characteristics in different countries, regions, and industries. Many empirical studies show that, from the national or local level, differences in environmental regulation standards will lead to international and regional industrial transfer, resulting in the spatial transfer of employment and uncertainty of the impact of environmental regulation on employment [
18]. From the perspective of industry, the impact of environmental regulation on employment is heterogeneous among industries, which will lead to the flow of labor among industries, resulting in the linkage between various industries [
19].
With the increasingly severe emission reduction pressures, it is an inevitable requirement to improve the intensity of environmental regulation before reaching the environmental carrying capacity. According to Porter hypothesis, appropriate environmental regulation may stimulate technological innovation of enterprises, while the enterprises’ change of production technology will produce an uncertain employment effect. From the perspective of the stage of technology adoption by enterprises, the process of enterprises’ improvement or introduction of advanced clean production technology to obtain technological progress forces enterprises to crowd out production and investment, which will affect the scale and market share of enterprises, thus adversely affecting employment. With the application of cleaner production technology, costs begin to be offset or even recovered, and the demand for environmentally sound products increases. Enterprises that take the initiative to adopt cleaner production technology will gain a higher market share and provide more jobs. From the perspective of the types of technologies adopted by enterprises, if enterprises choose production-oriented technological progress, it may produce a crowding out effect on the labor force due to the improvement of capital intensity. If enterprises choose to make progress in pollution control technology, it will promote the development of the environmental protection industry and create new labor demand. What is the overall effect of technological innovation on employment growth under environmental constraints? Is environmental regulation holding back the creation of jobs through technological innovation? The answers to these questions will help us better understand and resolve the dilemma of high-quality development and employment growth under current environmental regulation.
While the existing studies do lay the foundation and offer some inspiration for this paper, our study is one of the first that explores the regulatory role of environmental regulation in the impact of technological innovation on enterprise employment in China. Based on the direct impact of technological innovation on enterprise employment, as a new perspective, this paper aims to take environmental regulation as a moderating variable to analyze the relationship between technological innovation and enterprise employment, which will make the research on the relationship between technological innovation and employment more accurate and comprehensive. The marginal contribution of this paper is as follows: First, this paper brings environmental regulation, technological innovation, and enterprise employment into the same analytical framework in order to identify the mechanism of environmental regulation on the complex relationship between technological innovation and employment growth. Second, this paper is the first to adopt the moderating effect model to investigate how environmental regulations affect the relationship between technological innovation and enterprise employment based on the A-share manufacturing companies listed in Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges from 2011 to 2017. Third, this paper explores the differences in the impacts of environmental regulation and technological innovation on the employment of manufacturing enterprises for different types of enterprises. The main purpose of this study is to distinguish the impact of environmental regulation of enterprises with different ownership structures and different industry characteristics on the relationship between technological innovation and employment so as to provide a reference for the government to formulate effective environmental policies and innovation policies for a range of enterprises.
This paper is organized as follows.
Section 2 provides an overview of the related literature and proposes the research hypotheses.
Section 3 introduces the design and methodology of this study and shows the variables chosen as well as data sources.
Section 4 describes our empirical results and presents our discussion. Finally,
Section 5 provides conclusions and policy implications.
4. Empirical Results and Discussion
Based on the panel data of A-share manufacturing companies listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges from 2011 to 2017 as a sample for the econometric test, the Hausman test results indicated that the fixed effect model should be selected by considering the heteroscedasticity and cross-section correlation using the “xtscc, fe” command to perform regression to reduce the effects of heteroscedasticity and cross-section correlation on regression results. Due to the large differences in product characteristics and production processes between enterprises in different manufacturing industries, industries with different levels of pollution and different levels of technology respond differently to environmental regulation. Therefore, we classified manufacturing enterprises according to the difference between pollution degree [
58] and technical level [
53] in industries to which the enterprises belong (see
Appendix A), and further examined the relationship between environmental regulation, technological innovation, and enterprise employment on the basis of classification.
4.1. Full-Sample Regression
The results of the regression of all the samples of 124 listed companies are shown in
Table 3. Model 1 is the return of technological innovation to employment, model 2 is the return of environmental regulation to employment, and model 3 is the return of the interaction item between technological innovation and environmental regulation on employment.
According to
Table 3, model 1 shows that technological innovation was significantly positively correlated with enterprise employment, with a coefficient of 0.0150. Hypothesis 1 was verified, and the increase in R&D investment of enterprises did not reduce the labor demand of enterprises. From the enterprise level, the impact of technological innovation on enterprise employment was positive, which may be because enterprise R&D investment improved the productivity, increased the demand for products, expanded the scale of enterprises, and won a greater market share. The compensation effect was greater than the substitution effect, and the demand for labor increased. Meanwhile, model 2 shows that there was a positive correlation between enterprise environmental regulation and labor demand, with a significant coefficient of 0.0426, and hypothesis 2 was verified. This indicates that the labor demand of enterprises rose with the increase of environmental protection expenditure, which supports the hypothesis of a double dividend of employment. When the environmental protection expenditure increased, although the cost of the enterprise became larger, which was due to environmental protection activities, such as environmental treatment at the end of production, the cost effectiveness was less than the substitution effect, and it did not crowd out the employment. Moreover, model 3 shows that enterprise environmental regulation played an obvious regulatory role in technological innovation and enterprise employment, with a negative direction and a coefficient of −0.0207, with hypothesis 3 being verified. That is, with the increase of environmental protection expenditure, the marginal effect of R&D investment on enterprise employment decreased. This may be because the environmental protection expenditure of enterprises squeezed the cost of R&D investment, which led to a decrease in the employment effect of R&D investment. It may also be that the progress of pollution control technology caused by environmental regulation was less than the production-oriented technological progress, or the progress of pollution control technology was biased toward the use of capital rather than labor, which caused the employment effect of technological innovation to have diminishing returns.
For the control variables, operation income, enterprise size, and years of listing had a positive impact on enterprise employment, and enterprise wage level had a negative impact on enterprise employment. The higher the operating income of an enterprise was, the higher the possibility of obtaining a higher net profit was, and the enterprise could increase the output of products and input more labor force. At the same time, the larger the enterprise scale was, the larger the fixed asset investment was, and the more labor input that was needed for the normal operation of the enterprise. The longer a company was listed, the more research and development costs were recovered, and the market share of the company was gradually expanded, providing more employment opportunities. The higher the wage level was, the higher the labor cost would be, and most enterprises chose to reduce the number of employees and reduce the loss.
The results of the full-sample indicate that: (1) Technological innovation had a direct positive effect on enterprise employment, that is, technological innovation promoted employment increase. (2) Environmental regulation had positive effects on enterprises, and it did not cause a reduction in employment in enterprises, which verified the hypothesis of double dividend between environmental regulation and employment. (3) Environmental regulation had a significant negative effect on the regulatory effect of technological innovation and enterprise employment. The continuous improvement of the level of environmental regulation stimulated the technological upgrading of enterprises to a certain extent. The upgrading of technology was accompanied by the use of large and efficient mechanical equipment, which led to the substitution effect of mechanical equipment on the labor force and led to a decrease in the number of employees. According to the above theoretical analysis, at present, technological progress stimulated by China’s environmental regulation is more reflected in the progress of production technology, thus reducing employment, while the progress of pollution control technology is not obvious, so the development of the environmental protection industry brought about by the progress of pollution control technology and the growth of employment have not been highlighted [
59,
60,
61].
4.2. Comparison of Different Ownership Structures
This section further explores the differences in the impacts of environmental regulation and technological innovation on the employment of manufacturing enterprises for different types of enterprises. Enterprises with different ownership structures often face different levels of government intervention. The government will intervene in the employment behavior of state-owned enterprises. The government’s intervention costs for private enterprises are relatively high, which prevents redundant employment in private enterprises [
62]. At the same time, different relations between government and enterprises also have a certain impact on enterprises’ R&D investment [
63]. Under the environmental policy, enterprises of different natures face different levels of intervention, so it is necessary to conduct a comparative analysis of enterprises with different ownership structures.
The results of models 4–9 in
Table 4 show that there were significant differences in the impact of environmental regulation and technological innovation on enterprise employment in enterprises with different property rights. According to
Table 4, models 4–6 are regression results of state-owned enterprises, and models 7–9 are the empirical results of private enterprises. In state-owned enterprises, model 4 indicates that the influence coefficient of enterprise technological innovation on enterprise employment was 0.0285, model 5 indicates that the influence coefficient of environmental regulation on enterprise employment was 0.0473, and model 6 shows that the influence coefficient of interaction between environmental regulation and technological innovation on enterprise employment was −0.0256. In private enterprises, the influence coefficient of technological innovation on enterprise employment in model 7 was 0.0286, model 8 indicates that the influence coefficient of environmental regulation on enterprise employment was 0.0361, and model 9 indicates that the influence coefficient of interaction between environmental regulation and technological innovation on enterprise employment was −0.00992, but there was no significant influence. It can be seen that compared with private enterprises, technological innovation of state-owned enterprises had a slightly smaller positive effect on enterprise employment, and environmental regulation had a more significant positive effect on enterprise employment [
64]. Meanwhile, environmental regulation had a greater negative regulatory effect on the relationship between technological innovation and enterprise employment.
In conclusion, in both state-owned enterprises and private enterprises, technological innovation and environmental regulation had a positive impact on enterprise employment. This may be because private enterprises were less negatively regulated by environmental regulation, so the positive employment effect of technological innovation of private enterprises was larger than that of state-owned enterprises in general. It is worth noting that in private enterprises, the negative regulatory effect of environmental regulation on the relationship between technological innovation and employment was not significant.
In order to intuitively demonstrate this regulatory effect and further compare the regulatory effect of environmental regulation between state-owned enterprises and private enterprises, we drew the regulatory effect diagram corresponding to enterprises with different property rights, as shown in
Figure 2. Both in private enterprises and state-owned enterprises, the regulatory effect of environmental regulation was negative, but we found that the slope of state-owned enterprises was smaller than that of private enterprises, which means that for state-owned enterprises, environmental regulation had a greater negative impact on the employment effect of technological innovation.
4.3. Comparison of Different Industry Characteristics
Since the relationship between environmental regulation, technological innovation, and enterprise employment may also be heterogeneous with the degree of pollution and the level of technology, manufacturing enterprises were classified according to pollution level and technical level of the industries they belong to. First, we divided manufacturing enterprises into clean enterprises and pollution-intensive enterprises. Second, we divided manufacturing enterprises into high-tech enterprises and low- and medium-tech enterprises.
Due to the difference in the degree of pollution among different industries, the impact of technological innovation on the employment of enterprises under environmental policies may also have different results. Therefore, we analyzed the employment situation of enterprises in different industries according to the degree of pollution. The results of models 10–15 in
Table 5 show that there were significant differences in the impact of environmental regulation and technological innovations on employment of enterprises with different levels of pollution. According to
Table 5, models 10–12 are regression results of enterprises in the clean industries, and models 13–15 are empirical results of enterprises in the pollution-intensive industries. For enterprises in the clean industries, model 10 shows that the influence coefficient of technological innovation on enterprise employment was 0.0788, model 11 shows that the influence coefficient of environmental regulation on enterprise employment was 0.0568, and model 12 shows that the influence coefficient of interaction between environmental regulation and technological innovation on enterprise employment was −0.00221, but it was not significant. For enterprises in pollution-intensive industries, the influence coefficient of enterprise technological innovation on enterprise employment in model 13 was 0.00685, the influence coefficient of environmental regulation on enterprise employment in model 14 was 0.0334, and the influence coefficient of interaction between environmental regulation and technological innovation on enterprise employment in model 15 was −0.0285. Compared with enterprises in pollution-intensive industries, technological innovation of enterprises in the clean industries had a greater positive effect on enterprise employment, environmental regulation had a relatively significant positive effect on enterprise employment [
53], and environmental regulation had a smaller negative regulatory effect on the relationship between technological innovation and enterprise employment.
In summary, both the technological innovation of enterprises in clean industries and that of enterprises in pollution-intensive industries had a positive impact on employment, and environmental regulation played a positive role in the employment performance of enterprises. The negative regulation of environmental regulation of enterprises in clean industries was smaller than that in pollution-intensive industries, and eventually, positive employment effect of technological innovation in clean industries was greater than that in pollution-intensive industries. The regulation of environmental regulation in the clean industries was smaller, and the employment growth of innovative enterprises in the clean industries was in line with the green employment demand under the consensus of the international community, which was conducive to improving the green employment capacity.
Similarly, in order to further compare the regulatory effect of environmental regulation between enterprises in the clean industries and those in the pollution-intensive industries, we drew the regulatory effect diagram corresponding to enterprises in industries with different pollution levels, as shown in
Figure 3. Both in enterprises of clean industries and pollution-intensive industries, the regulatory effect of environmental regulation was negative, but we found that the slope of pollution-intensive industries was less than that of clean industries, which means for enterprises of pollution-intensive industries, the environmental regulation effect on employment of technological innovation negative influence was greater.
Next, we analyzed the situation of enterprises in industries with different technical levels. The results of models 16–21 in
Table 6 show that there were differences in the regulating effects of environmental regulation and technological innovation on enterprise employment in industries with different technological levels.
According to
Table 6, models 16–18 are regression results of enterprises in high-tech industries, and models 19–21 are empirical results of enterprises in low- and medium-tech industries. In high-tech enterprises, model 16 shows that the impact coefficient of technological innovation on enterprise employment was 0.0305, model 17 shows that the impact coefficient of environmental regulation on enterprise employment was 0.0485, model 18 shows that the interaction term of environmental regulation and technological innovation on enterprise employment was −0.0146, and the regulatory effect was significantly negative. For enterprises in the low- and medium-tech industries, the influence coefficient of technological innovation on enterprise employment in model 19 was 0.00622, the influence coefficient of environmental regulation on enterprise employment in model 20 was 0.0242, and the influence coefficient of interaction between environmental regulation and technological innovation on enterprise employment in model 21 was −0.0235. The negative regulation effect of environmental regulation was relatively large and significant in both high-tech and low- and medium-tech industries, which means that under the influence of environmental regulation, the employment effect of technological innovation had diminishing marginal returns. Compared with enterprises in low- and medium-tech industries, the technological innovation of enterprises in high-tech industries had a greater positive effect on enterprise employment, environmental regulation had a positive effect on enterprise employment, and environmental regulation had a smaller negative regulating effect on the relationship between R&D investment and enterprise employment.
Above all, both technological innovation of enterprises in high-tech industries and that of low- and medium-tech industries had a significant positive effect on enterprise employment. Environmental regulation played a positive role in enterprise employment. The negative regulatory effect of environmental regulation of enterprises in high-tech industries was smaller than that in the low- and medium-tech industries, and the positive employment effect of the technological innovation of the enterprises of high-tech industries was greater than that of the low- and medium-tech enterprises. The environmental regulation of high-tech enterprises had a less negative effect on the innovation employment effect. The employment growth of high-tech enterprises was in line with the basic requirements of China’s current development of a high-quality economy, which was conducive to optimizing the employment structure and improving the quality of employment. This conclusion is consistent with the creation effect of technological innovation in high-tech sectors derived by Piva and Vivarelli [
40].
To further compare the regulating effect of environmental regulation between enterprises in high-tech industries and enterprises in low- and medium-tech industries, we drew the regulating effect diagram corresponding to enterprises in industries with different technical levels, as shown in
Figure 4. Both in high-tech industries and low- and medium-tech industries, environmental regulation of regulating effect was negative, but we found that the slope of the low- and medium-tech industries was smaller than that of high-tech industries, which means that for enterprises of low- and medium-tech industries, the environmental regulation effect on employment of technological innovation negative influence was greater.
4.4. Robustness Test
In order to prove the stability of the research conclusions, this paper used the GMM-SYS method to test the stability of the relationship between environmental regulation, technological innovation, and employment growth. Due to the paucity of observations, when the entire sample was split in sub-samples, the GMM method could not be continued. According to
Table 7, the results of the total sample analysis show that the direct impact of technological innovation on employment growth was a positive effect (0.359), the regression coefficient of environmental regulation on employment growth was significantly positive (0.414), and the regulatory effect of environmental regulation on technological innovation and employment growth was negative (−0.0214). The direction and magnitude of the regression coefficients of each model were basically consistent with the above, indicating that research conclusions of this paper are relatively stable.
5. Conclusions and Policy Implications
5.1. Conclusions
This paper considered the research question: “In the context of environmental protection and high-quality economic development, does environmental regulation hinder the employment creation of technological innovation in enterprises?” To do so, panel data of listed Chinese manufacturing companies (2011–2017) were selected and empirical tests were carried out by adopting the moderating effect model. The following conclusions are drawn:
(1) The overall impact of technological innovation on enterprise employment was reflected in the creation effect. The employment effect of technological innovation of state-owned enterprises was slightly smaller than that of private enterprises. The employment effect of technological innovation of enterprises in the clean industries was larger than that of enterprises in the pollution-intensive industries. The employment effect of technological innovation of enterprises in the high-tech industries was larger than that of enterprises in the low- and medium-tech industries.
(2) On the whole, the direct impact of environmental regulation on enterprise employment was significantly positive. The positive effect of environmental regulation on the employment in state-owned enterprises was greater than that in private enterprises. The coefficient of positive correlation between environmental regulation and employment of enterprises in the clean industries was larger than that of enterprises in the pollution-intensive industries. The positive effect of environmental regulation on the employment of enterprises in the high-tech industries was larger than that of enterprises in the low- and medium-tech industries.
(3) The regulatory effect of environmental regulation on the relationship between technological innovation and enterprise employment was negative, and there was obvious enterprise heterogeneity. Among them, the negative regulation impact of environmental regulation on the employment effect of technological innovation in state-owned enterprises was larger than that in private enterprises. The environmental regulation of enterprises in pollution-intensive industries had a negative adjustment effect on the relationship between technological innovation and employment, which was more than that in clean industries. Environmental regulation of low- and medium-tech industries had a bigger negative influence than that of high-tech industries. At the present stage in China, the development of pollution-control technology is relatively lagging behind, which leads to the insufficient impetus for the development of the environmental protection industry and a limited increase in employment. However, environmental regulation stimulates the progress of production technology more obviously, which leads to the more prominent phenomenon of reducing employment.
5.2. Policy Implications
The important policy implications of these conclusions are as follows:
(1) Increase government environmental research and development subsidies to improve enterprises’ ability regarding environmental technology innovation. Both environmental regulation and technological innovation are positive for the employment of enterprises. It may be that the environmental protection expenditure of enterprises increases the environmental cost of enterprises, and the investment in research and development of enterprises may be somewhat squeezed out. Therefore, under the regulation of environmental regulation, the employment growth margin of technological innovation is diminishing. By increasing enterprises’ investment in environmental research and development and improving enterprises’ ability of environmental innovation, the tension between environmental protection expenditure and research and development investment can be turned into coordinated development so as to achieve a win-win situation of high-quality development and employment.
(2) Support the green development of private enterprises, and cultivate and strengthen private leading enterprises in environmental protection. Compared with state-owned enterprises, environmental regulation of private enterprises has a less negative regulating effect on the relationship between technological innovation and employment. Private enterprises have an innovation consciousness toward a constantly deepening innovation of practical technology; can quickly adapt to the market; have flexible management mechanisms; can constantly increase investment in facilities and research and development in the field of ecological and environmental governance; and actively explore collaborative governance, industrial integration, and other mode innovation, which is the new force of ecological and environmental governance.
(3) Eliminate enterprises with high energy consumption and high pollution, and encourage green transformation and technological upgrading. The negative moderating effect of environmental regulation on the employment effect of technological innovation of enterprises in pollution-intensive industries is relatively more obvious than that of enterprises in clean industries. Meanwhile, the crowding out effect of environmental regulation on the employment effect of technological innovation of enterprises low- and medium-tech industries is larger than that of high-tech industries. Accelerating the transformation of heavy polluting enterprises into clean enterprises and low- and medium-tech enterprises into high-tech enterprises can weaken the negative impact of environmental regulation on the employment effect of technological innovation of enterprises.
5.3. Limilations
Although this study provides valuable insights, it has limitations, which should serve to stimulate further research. First, because the data of pollution emission of enterprises are not available, this paper selected the enterprise environmental protection expenditure as the index to measure the intensity of environmental regulation, which has some defects. Second, from the theoretical level, the technological innovation induced by environmental regulation can be divided into production-oriented technological innovation and pollution-control technological innovation. In this paper, we have not further differentiated the types of technological innovation in the empirical research. It is conducive to deeply analyzing the transmission path that environmental regulation affects the relationship between technological innovation and employment through figuring out whether the technological innovation induced by environmental regulation is production-oriented or pollution-control technological innovation. In further research, we will try to expand the research by taking panel data from China’s manufacturing industries as the research subject to improve the above issues.