The impact of digital finance on green innovation: Evidence from provinces in China

Abstract

This paper tries to uncover the shock of digital finance on green innovation by employing data for 30 provinces, municipalities or autonomous regions in China via estimation of fixed effect model and further divides the whole sample into three regions to see whether this impact is constant among the east, central, and west regions. The empirical study shows that higher level of digital finance is usually associated with better green innovation, which is reliable while we carry out robustness tests. Furthermore, while coverage and depth of digital finance benefits for green innovation, the degree of it cannot affect green innovation. In addition, heterogeneity analysis for different regions shows that while the digital finance tends to be beneficial for green innovation in western and central regions, it exerts no significant impact in easter regions.