School of Economics and Business Administration,Chongqing University, No. 174 Shazhengjie, Shapingba District, Chongqing, 400044, PR China.
J Environ Manage. 2023 Jun 1;335:117525. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2023.117525. Epub 2023 Feb 21.
Green innovation will be one of the main drivers of future economic development. In the current wave of digital transformation, there is a paucity of literature that considers how corporate digital transformation affects green innovation and the characteristics of green innovation. Based on the data of China A-share listed manufacturing companies from 2007 to 2020, we find that digital transformation significantly improves corporate green innovation. This conclusion is robust to a series of robustness tests. The mechanism analysis finds that digital transformation promotes green innovation by increasing the investment of innovation resources and reducing the cost of debt. We further find that digital transformation significantly increases the number of citations of green patents, reflecting the pursuit of "quality" of green innovation by enterprises. At the same time, digital transformation is conducive to the simultaneous improvement of "source reduction" and "end-cleaning" green innovation, reflecting the combination of different pollution governance methods at the source and end of the enterprise. Finally, digital transformation can sustainably improve the level of green innovation. Our findings provide useful insights for promoting green technology innovation in emerging markets.
绿色创新将成为未来经济发展的主要驱动力之一。在当前数字化转型的浪潮中，很少有文献考虑企业数字化转型如何影响绿色创新和绿色创新的特点。基于 2007 年至 2020 年中国 A 股上市制造业公司的数据，我们发现数字化转型显著提高了企业的绿色创新水平。这一结论在一系列稳健性检验中具有稳健性。机制分析发现，数字化转型通过增加创新资源投入和降低债务成本来促进绿色创新。我们进一步发现，数字化转型显著增加了绿色专利的引用数量，反映了企业对绿色创新“质量”的追求。同时，数字化转型有利于“源头减排”和“末端清洁”绿色创新的同步提升，反映了企业源头和末端不同污染治理方法的结合。最后，数字化转型可以持续提高绿色创新水平。我们的研究结果为促进新兴市场的绿色技术创新提供了有益的见解。
