Corporate digitalization, application modes, and green growth: Evidence from the innovation of Chinese listed companies

Abstract

Digitalization is one of the main ways for enterprise growth in the digital economy era. However, the existing literature on digital technology application models and their impact on corporate green growth is rare. By using the green innovation data of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2008 to 2020, this paper empirically investigates the association between enterprise digitalization and green innovation. The empirical results show that digitalization has significantly improved enterprises’ substantive green innovation level, which is valid after conducting a series of endogenous and robustness tests. Further results show that digital technology application, intelligent manufacturing application, and modern information system application are the three main models of digitalization to promote green innovation of enterprises, while internet business model application cannot significantly promote corporate green innovation. In addition, the mechanism analysis results indicate that the increase in government subsidy and corporate own R&D investment contribute to the incentive effect mentioned above, while the loss of governance efficiency and fluctuation of the external environment offset this effect. This incentive effect is more obvious in non-state-owned, high-tech, and lower-polluted industry enterprises. Our paper reveals the mode and mechanisms for enterprises to realize innovative green growth by applying digital technology in the digital economy era, which is of great significance to relevant theoretical research and policy formulation.