Digital Transformation Disclosure and Green Technological Innovation Toward Sustainable Manufacturing: Evidence from Chinese Listed Firms

Abstract

Green technological innovation is important to the sustainable development of manufacturing. As a core driver of transition toward sustainable production patterns, green innovation helps firms reduce environmental externalities while maintaining economic competitiveness. Drawing on the Resource-Based View and the Knowledge-Based View, this study examines the association between digital-transformation disclosure and green technological innovation using 16,231 firm-year observations for Chinese A-share listed manufacturing firms from 2015 to 2022. Green technological innovation is measured by green patent applications, and the baseline specifications use negative binomial models with year and industry fixed effects, province-clustered standard errors, and a full control set that includes firm size. Digital-transformation disclosure is positively associated with green patent applications. Parallel-mediation estimates and province-clustered Bootstrap confidence intervals identify significant indirect effects through inter-organizational knowledge flow, R&D expenditure intensity, and the R&D personnel share. In terms of point estimates, the R&D personnel indirect effect is the largest of the three, followed by knowledge flow and R&D expenditure; however, only the R&D personnel versus R&D expenditure difference is statistically significant, and the three channels are better characterized as complementary. The difference between the knowledge-flow and R&D-expenditure effects is marginally significant. The hypothesized inverted-U moderating pattern of market competition is not statistically significant in the preferred specification with industry and year fixed effects. Split-sample estimates show directional heterogeneity across region, ownership, and firm size, but formal interaction tests do not reject equality of the digital transformation disclosure coefficients across groups. These results document robust associations rather than definitive causal effects and highlight the complementary roles of knowledge recombination, R&D expenditure, and technical personnel in green patenting. These findings carry implications for sustainability-oriented research and management practice by documenting channels through which digital-transformation disclosure is associated with green patent activity in the manufacturing sector.