Green Technological Innovation and Corporate Resilience: Evidence from Chinese Listed Companies

Abstract

Climate change and economic volatility have made it increasingly important to understand whether firms can pursue environmental innovation while retaining the capacity to withstand disruption. Using observations on Chinese A-share listed companies over 2010–2022, this paper evaluates the association between green technological innovation and corporate resilience, considers two possible transmission channels, and examines variation across firm and industry settings. Across all three patent-based measures, higher levels of green technological innovation are associated with greater corporate resilience. This pattern remains robust in tests using alternative measures, industry-by-year and firm fixed effects, lagged regressors, instrumental variables, and entropy balancing. Mediation tests suggest that financing constraints and environmental management level may serve as two potential channels linking green technological innovation to corporate resilience. The relationship is stronger for non-state-owned firms and for companies in heavily polluting or non-high-tech industries, whereas the regional and media-attention patterns differ by patent type. Green technological innovation is also associated with higher total factor productivity. These findings add firm-level evidence to the literature on environmental innovation and organizational resilience and provide implications for green innovation policy and corporate risk management.