Does corruption sand the wheels of sustainable development? Evidence through green innovation

Abstract This study investigates the impact of corruption on green innovation, as corruption may impede or foster green innovation in developing economies due to their weak governance systems. We develop a dataset of Chinese non‐financial firms listed between 2007 and 2020 and apply static and dynamic regression techniques. The results indicate a highly significant negative association between corruption and green innovation. This supports the notion that corruption culture reduces corporate legitimacy concerns ( institutional theory ), increases managerial rent‐seeking ( agency theory ), and hinders green innovation, thus impeding sustainable development and supporting the “ sand the wheels ” hypothesis. Our analysis also reveals that corruption's negative impact on green innovation is particularly significant for firms with lower media and analyst coverage, non‐state‐owned firms, and firms in heavy‐polluting industries. These results are robust to alternate proxies of green innovation and corruption as well as econometric specifications that account for endogeneity issues and industry, region, and time‐fixed effects.