Aug 2026· Administrative Sciences· Vol 16, pp. 374· 0 citations· 35 references
Abstract
Whether China’s carbon trading pilots stimulate firm-level innovation remains contested. This study investigates the conditional effect of carbon pricing on green invention patents, moderated by firms’ digital transformation capability. Using an unbalanced panel of 31,048 firm-year observations from A-share listed companies (2011–2022) and a two-way fixed-effects difference-in-differences estimator, we find no significant unconditional average treatment effect, consistent with attenuated price signals in China’s pilots. However, digital capability substantially amplifies the innovation response: a one-standard-deviation increase in within-year digital capability is associated with a 4.6% rise in expected green invention patents among treated firms. The moderating effect is exclusive to examination-intensive invention patents rather than utility model registrations, consistent with a strong-form Porter mechanism. Sub-dimension analysis identifies strategic leadership and digital achievement as the operative channels. The results are robust to alternative estimators, cohort decomposition, and sample restrictions. Together, the findings reframe digital transformation as a policy-contingent complementary asset and extend the Porter hypothesis to an organizational-capabilities dimension.
This paper examines whether green finance policy promotes corporate digital transformation (CDT) at the firm level. Using China’s Green Finance Reform and Innovation Pilot Zones (GFRIPZ), launched in 2017, as a quasi-natural experiment, we apply a difference-in-differences approach to Chinese A-share-listed firms from...
Siliang Liu· The Economics and Finance Le...· 0 citations
In light of the global low-carbon transition and the spread of digital technology, carbon allowances have transformed from compliance costs into tradable value-generating carbon assets for high-emission firms. However, the micro mechanisms driving carbon asset value appreciation have not been well studied. Using an un...
Zi-Yu Jia, Xingqin Lyu, Xiao-Wei Ma et al.· Journal of Economics and Man...· 0 citations
Green innovation is essential to the low-carbon transition, but aggregate patent counts may conceal changes in the technological quality of corporate innovation. Using this observation as a starting point, this study asks how economic policy uncertainty (EPU) affects green innovation and its quality structure among Chi...
Abstract:This study examines the effect of green technological innovation on carbon dioxide (CO2) intensity across Chinese provinces from 2000 to 2020. It distinguishes between invention patents and utility model patents to identify heterogeneous mechanisms across regional, regulatory and spatial contexts. Employing sp...
Chang-hwan Choi· China: An International Jour...· 0 citations
Using Patent Application Data from the State Intellectual Property Office of China, we examine the relationship between ESG information disclosure and firms' environmental innovation, using more than 3500 listed firms. Methodologically, we develop a micro‐founded structural model, which maps directly to relevant empi...
A. Andrikopoulos, P. Michaelides, Guan-Xia Xie· The Financial Review· 0 citations
Firms can invest in digitalization without necessarily producing greener inventions; resource organization and financial continuity may determine whether that potential is realized. This paper studies 24,126 firm-year observations for Chinese A-share listed firms over 2013–2024. Annual-report vocabulary is used to gaug...
