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How does green finance affect the innovation performance of enterprises? Evidence from China

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Abstract

“green” + “innovation” has become a new concept of development. The integration of the two can bring win-win for the environment and economy. This paper selects the annual data of 14309 A-share companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchange from 2012 to 2020 as the research sample. And it uses the two-way fixed effect model to empirically test the impact of green finance on enterprise innovation performance. The study found that the development of green finance can promote the improvement of enterprise innovation performance. The analysis of influence mechanism shows that the development of green finance can reduce the financing constraints of enterprises, and then improve the innovation performance of enterprises; the development of green finance can increase the R&D investment of enterprises, and then improve the innovation performance of enterprises; green finance development can increase corporate investment in environmental protection, which in turn can improve corporate innovation performance. The results of heterogeneity test analysis show that compared with the western region, private enterprises, small and medium-sized enterprises, and high energy consumption and high pollution enterprises, the development of green finance in the central and eastern regions, state-owned enterprises, large enterprises, and non double high enterprises has more obvious role in promoting enterprise innovation performance. Therefore, the government should issue relevant policies and actively promote green finance policies that can help improve environmental and economic issues.

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Data availability

The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Funding

This work was supported by a grant of Shandong federation of social science (2022-JRZZ-06); Shandong Provincial Association for Science of Arts & Culture (QN201844); the Natural Science Foundation of Hebei Province(G2020208002); and Humanities and Social Science Research Project of Hebei Education Department (SQ2021138, SQ201106); Social Science Development Research Project of Hebei Province in 2021(20210501002); Hebei Social Science Foundation Youth Project(HB21MZ005).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Economics and Management, Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, 266590, China

    Chao Liu, Congcong Dai & Junjing Zhong

  2. Department of Finance and Economics, Shandong University of Science and Technology, Jinan, 250000, China

    Shuai Chen

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  1. Chao Liu
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  2. Congcong Dai
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  3. Shuai Chen
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Contributions

Conceptualization, Chao Liu and Congcong Dai; methodology, Congcong Dai; software, Congcong Dai; validation, Congcong Dai; formal analysis, Congcong Dai; investigation, Shuai Chen; resources, Chao Liu and Shuai Chen; data curation, Congcong Dai; writing—original draft preparation, Chao Liu and Congcong Dai; writing—review and editing, Shuai Chen; visualisation, Shuai Chen and Junjing Zhong; supervision, Shuai Chen and Junjing Zhong; project administration, Chao Liu; funding acquisition, Shuai Chen. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Shuai Chen.

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Liu, C., Dai, C., Chen, S. et al. How does green finance affect the innovation performance of enterprises? Evidence from China. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30, 84516–84536 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-28063-1

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