The technological innovation efficiency of China's lithium-ion battery listed enterprises: Evidence from a three-stage DEA model and micro-data

Large-scale clean energy deployment and energy consumption electrification are important measures for China to respond to severe climate challenges and achieve carbon neutrality goals, and the development of lithium-ion battery storage technology is essential to enable clean energy transition. Using three-stage DEA and Tobit model, this paper evaluated the real technological innovation efficiency (TIE) of China's lithium-ion battery listed enterprises (CLBLEs) during 2009–2018, and explored how external environment and enterprise management factors influence the TIE. The results demonstrate that there exist inefficiency problems of the TIE of CLBLEs due to the diseconomies of scale. The average TIE of CLBLEs is low, at 0.39. The stated-owned enterprises, large-scale enterprises, and downstream enterprises have the highest TIE, and mainly concentrated in eastern region. For external environmental factors, regional economic level and government subsidy promote TIE. While for internal enterprise management factors, firm size, financial leverage, profitability, and employee quality significantly promote TIE. Thus, for policy makers, strengthening the implementation of industrial support policies, enhancing industrial agglomeration, and promoting the sharing of innovative resources are conducive to improving the scale efficiency of CLBLEs. In addition, improving management capabilities and personnel composition is also an important direction to promote the TIE of CLBLEs.