Corporate green innovation behaviour and investment efficiency: evidence from China

ABSTRACT

Corporate green innovation has aroused attention from academics and practitioners in recent years, but the green innovation-investment decision nexus is less explored. Using Chinese-listed firms in the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchange from 2007 to 2019 as a sample, our research finds that green innovation significantly improves investment efficiency by mitigating over-investment. This finding still holds after addressing endogeneity tests and conducting additional robustness checks. Channel analysis shows that research and development expenditure is an underlying mechanism. Further examinations reveal that green innovation’s influence is more significant in non-politically connected, low-financing-constrained firms and firms with many independent directors. Our paper offers new insights into the influence at firm-level of concrete corporate social responsibility strategies, and the green innovation-investment decision nexus, and presents important policy implications for sustainable development.

KEYWORDS:

• Corporate green innovation
• corporate investment efficiency
• stakeholder theory
• CSR
• over-investment

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• G30
• G38

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, [CS], upon reasonable request.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00036846.2023.2210828

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ According to (Li, Chen, and Yuan 2022), we classify the following codes of industries as heavy-polluting industries: B06, B08, C13, C14, C15, C17, C20, C22, C25, C26, C28, C30, C31, C32, and D44.