Green Innovation Effect of Policies in Green Finance Pilot Zones

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-774-3_12How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Green finance policy; Corporate innovation; Double difference model; Substantive innovation; Strategic innovation

Abstract

This paper utilizes data from China A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2024 and employs the difference-in-differences method to analyze the impact of green finance pilot zone policies on corporate green innovation, exploring whether they promote substantive innovation or trigger strategic innovation. The study selects 8,481 company-year observations to form an unbalanced panel, estimating the effects using a two-way fixed effects model that controls for firm size, financial leverage, profitability, and other factors. The results show that the policy significantly increased corporate green invention patent applications but had little effect on green utility model patents, indicating that the policy primarily promotes substantive innovation with high technological content rather than merely catering to policy requirements through strategic innovation. Further heterogeneity analysis reveals that state-owned enterprises became more proactive in substantive innovation after policy implementation, which is related to their advantages in resource acquisition and policy execution. Robustness tests, which exclude initial policy-period samples, high-pollution industries, and municipal observations while altering core variable definitions, still yield valid conclusions, demonstrating that green finance pilot zone policies genuinely foster genuine technological innovation rather than superficial compliance.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Jinhao Li
AU  - Jieyu Tian
AU  - Haoxuan Chen
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/11
TI  - Green Innovation Effect of Policies in Green Finance Pilot Zones
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 5th International Conference on Mathematical Statistics and Economic Analysis (MSEA 2026
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 125
EP  - 140
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-774-3_12
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-774-3_12
ID  - Li2026
ER  -