The Dynamic Values of Political Embeddedness in Corporate Clean Energy Consumption : Evidence from the Chinese Industrial Firms

The massive consumption of non-clean energy has brought serious environmental challenges, and how to improve the energy consumption structure has become an important issue for the Chinese government. By incorporating both signaling and regulatory pressure mechanisms into a theoretical framework, we examine the political embeddedness of firms to understand how these mechanisms work at different levels of government and ultimately influence corporate energy strategies. Drawing on the data collected on Chinese industrial firms between 2001 and 2008, we find a U-shaped relationship between political embeddedness and corporate clean energy consumption, and this curvilinear relationship tends to be more flattened for firms in institutional uncertainty environment caused by official turnover