Does urban low-carbon governance affect firms’ business decisions for employing capital and labor?

This study investigates the impact of urban low-carbon governance on firms' capital-labor ratio. By treating China's low-carbon city pilot (LCCP) policy as an urban low-carbon governance instrument, we apply a difference-in-differences method (DID) and find that the LCCP program significantly reduces firms' capital-labor ratio, but the effect only manifests in state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The mechanism result demonstrates that to intensify urban low-carbon governance, local governments adjusted fiscal expenditure structure, resulting in SOEs employing less capital and more labor. This may be a business strategy adopted by SOEs to avoid environmental regulations, as we find that urban low-carbon governance significantly improves green technology innovation in non-SOEs, but not in SOEs.