Exploring the Impact of Firm Transparency on Green Innovation Legitimacy: Empirical Evidence from Listed Companies in China

Abstract

Although the existing literature on innovation has little focus on information transparency, we aimed to determine how information transparency affects the legitimacy of green innovation in China. Accounting data, analyst data, and external audit data are used to evaluate a company’s information transparency. This paper examines the impact of corporate transparency on the legitimacy of green innovation in the context of three external information sources to which stakeholders have access, utilizing data from 4017 Chinese companies listed between 2005 and 2020. Our estimation results indicate a significant positive correlation between informational accessibility and green innovation legitimacy. The results demonstrate a stronger relationship between corporate green innovation legitimacy and greater earning quality, more analyst monitoring, more accurate analyst surplus estimations, and international audits by the Big Four. This study seeks to present new empirical findings for Chinese listed companies in order to strengthen the legality of green innovation and validate the significance of corporate information transparency via a robustness test.