The impact of environmental regulations on the performance of regional collaborative innovation-in case of China's 30 provinces.

With rapid economic growth in the twenty-first century, innovation has become an essential component of national development, and industry-university-research regional collaborative innovation is the key to implementing China's innovation plan. Using panel data from 30 provinces and cities in China (excluding Tibet Autonomous Region) from 2011 to 2018, this paper employs the two-stage dynamic DEA model to develop a rating index system of regional collaborative innovation performance, which is divided into knowledge innovation stage and technology innovation stage, and measures the collaborative innovation efficiency of 30 provinces in China. The environmental regulation score is then determined by using the entropy method. Finally, an experimental application of the panel Tobit model is conducted to investigate the impact mechanism of environmental regulation on regional collaborative innovation. The results reveal that the collaborative innovation efficiency values of the majority of provinces are between 0.5 and 0.7, leaving ample room for growth. When the efficiency value of collaborative innovation is broken down by region, the eastern, central, and western regions show a pattern of "rising in the east, stable in the center, and falling in the west." The findings of the Tobit regression reveal that the effect of environmental regulation on regional collaborative innovation performance follows a "U"-shaped distribution, confirming the "Porter Hypothesis." This study proposes remedies and proposals to enhance regional collaborative innovation performance from the perspective of environmental regulation.