The impact of China's green credit policy on enterprise digital innovation: evidence from heavily-polluting Chinese listed companies

Purpose As an effective tool to promote rational resource allocation and facilitate the development of green management practices such as enterprise digital innovation, the green credit policy has recently gained extensive attention. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the relationship between green credit policies and the digital innovation of enterprises, and to further explore the mechanism of action between them and their boundary conditions. Design/methodology/approach Based on micro-level data on Chinese firms from 2007 to 2019, this paper constructs a difference-in-differences (DID) model to investigate the impact and intrinsic mechanisms of green credit policies on firms' digital innovation and its boundary conditions, with the help of a quasi-natural experiment, i.e. the Green Credit Guidelines. Findings Green credit policies inhibit digital innovation and fail to compensate for innovation. The analysis of the mechanism shows that the implementation of green credit policies has a negative impact on digital innovation by increasing the financing constraints faced by firms, and has also a crowding-out effect on R&D investment, resulting in a disincentive to digital innovation. Further analysis reveals that the negative impact of green credit policies on digital innovation is more pronounced in state-owned enterprises, enterprises without financially experienced executives, and in the eastern regions of China. Originality/value This study provides empirical evidence to understand the effectiveness and mechanism of influence of green credit policies on enterprise digital innovation, providing also a basis to further improve green credit policies.