Impact of Low-Carbon City Pilot Policies on Green Construction Industry Innovation

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This paper explores an important and meaningful question about sustainability in the construction industry. Overall, the article is well organized and its presentation is good. However, some minor issues still need to be improved:

(1)   The author needs to add an introduction to the low-carbon city pilot policy.

(2)   I propose to discuss the limitations of this work in Section 5.

(3)   I believe that the literature review section can be updated to 2024.

(4)   I suggest splitting the long sentences into two or more concise sentences in Section 5.2 to improve readability and comprehension.

(5)   Please confirm the format of subheading 2.

(6)   Please make sure the figures and tables are formatted correctly.

(7)   Please checks that line 2 of the Table 5 and Table 6 are correctly categorized.

(8)   Authors should address this issue in the revised draft. Kindly follow the right style of citation (references) throughout the manuscript by checking the guidelines of journal or any previously published paper in the journal.

(9)   Recently, some scholars have published quality papers on this topic. Please see the following studies in this regard to strengthen your manuscript. Innovation under environmental constraints: Does corporate environmental responsibility matter in green innovation? Modern cloud technologies for business and industry: opportunities and trends for Russian & Global markets. Online consumers build trust with online merchants through real-time interaction function.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Minor editing of English language required

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The authors of the manuscript wrote an interesting article relating to an important and current topic related to the analysis of the impact of pilot low-emission city policies on green innovations in the construction industry.

Please note the borrowings from other publications in the manuscript. This mainly concerns those fragments of the text that contain longer fragments of other texts, e.g.: "...it belongs to the control group, and the corresponding value of 𝑡𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑗 is 0; 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒 represents the dummy variable of the implementation time of lowcarbon city pilot policies in pilot provinces and cities..." and "...If the number of green patent applications of construction enterprises in pilot cities is significantly different from that in non-pilot cities after the implementation of the pilot policy, it indicates that the parallel trend between the control group and the experimental group is broken. The results of the parallel trend test are shown in Fig.1. The horizontal axis represents the year, and the vertical axis represents the..."

The literature review is incomplete. Please refer to more scientific publications on similar topics from recent years.

Please better justify your choice of hypotheses because they seem too obvious. This will apply to both the first hypothesis: "The pilot policy of low-carbon city can significantly drive the innovation of green technology in construction enterprises."and the second hypothesis: "With the financial support of the government, low-carbon city policies can significantly promote the green technology innovation of state-owned construction enterprises". An alternative solution is to reformulate these hypotheses.

In the last chapter (Research Conclusions and Policy Suggestions), please focus more on indicating what new things the analyzes conducted in the manuscript have contributed to science.

Please adapt the manuscript to the journal's requirements, mainly minor punctuation errors, e.g. missing dots in the titles of tables and figures, etc.

 

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Author(s),

 

Article “Research on the Impact of Low-Carbon City Pilot Policies on Green Innovation in Construction Industry” is well-structured and contains sufficient empirical analysis. However, the current version needs to be improved, including the following comments.

 

In “Keywords” part, I would recommend adding the words “China” as the object of study and the method of study: difference in difference.

 

In “Introduction” section, the authors write: “In order to address the challenges posed by global warming and achieve the objective of “carbon peak” and “carbon neutrality”, numerous countries have implemented diverse environmental regulatory measures to optimize the allocation of ecological resources at a societal level [6, 7]. These various environmental regulatory measures should be cited and briefly described.

 

From this section onwards, there are inconsistencies in citations and references: different author names, or without full authorship. Some articles were unavailable. I could not find some articles either by title or by journal. To avoid this inconvenience to readers, “References” section should include the appropriate hyperlinks or doi number for each reference.

 

The authors do not cite the studies on environmental technologies in the construction industry, however there are a number of relevant studies, including “Sustainability” journals. For example, 

 

Xingwei Li, Yicheng Huang, Jingru Li, Xiang Liu, Jinrong He, Jiachi Dai. The Mechanism of Influencing Green Technology Innovation Behavior: Evidence from Chinese Construction Enterprises. Buildings 2022, 12(2), 237;https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings12020237.

 

Jingxiao Zhang, You Ouyang, Pablo Ballesteros-Pérez, Hui Li, Simon P. Philbin, Zhaoling Li, Martin Skitmore. Understanding the impact of environmental regulations on green technology innovation efficiency in the construction industry. Sustainable Cities and Society. Volume 65, February 2021, 102647. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2020.102647.

 

And many others.

 

In the section “2.2 Government Resource Allocation and Enterprise Green Innovation”, the authors did not present any research to support the theses and hypothesis.

 

In section “3 Variable selection and model construction, 3.1 variable”, data sources and references to these data should be indicated.

 

The summary of data should be presented in a separate table, including all variables: outcome, exploratory and control according to their values: mean, max/min.

 

If “green patents in construction industry” is the main variable in the analysis, what “green” patents are, examples of them, data sources should be specified.

 

It is necessary to indicate the cities, their names and their number according to the three parts of the pilot activities studied in the analysis. 

 

In Section “3.2 Model Building”, it should be indicated why these control variables were applied.

 

In section “4.3.2. Placebo testing”, the authors write: “In this study, 17 cities were randomly selected from the sample cities to replace the actual pilot cities, while other cities were used as false control groups”. However, the authors previously indicated that only 18 cities were included in the analysis. This difference should be explained more clearly.

 

In section “4.4 Heterogeneity analysis, 4.4.1. Heterogeneity Analysis of Enterprise Ownership Types”, the authors write that “Previous studies have demonstrated that the ownership type of enterprises exerts a significant influence on the level of green innovation within China's market environment.”. The studies demonstrating this relationship should be presented.

 

In section “5. Research Conclusions and Policy Suggestions, 5.1 Research Conclusion” more detailed and meaningful discussion and conclusions should be given.

 

I hope these comments will help to improve the article.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Please correct parts of the manuscript that contain borrowings from other works. The similarity index in the anti-plagiarism report is too high: Percent match: 37% (iThenticate report).

Author Response

We revise the content of the original manuscript sentence by sentence according to the report you provide to reduce the repetition rate with other papers, except for some sentences involving professional terminology that can no longer be revised. In the resubmitted manuscript, the revised content is highlighted in green. Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf