The impact of digital finance on green innovation: resource effect and information effect

To realize "the future we want" proposed by the UN Development Agenda, it is highly necessary for China, which is the largest emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, to find ways to boost the green innovation of domestic firms. Digital finance, as an emerging product of the contemporary digital economy, provides a new research perspective for green innovation. Based on 2011-2019 panel data on A-shared listed companies in China, this article establishes a regression model and provides empirical evidence that digital finance can promote green innovation by exerting resource and information effects. Our results reveal that (1) digital finance can stimulate enterprises' green innovation by increasing the coverage of digital finance and the depth of use. (2) Digital finance can significantly improve the quantity and quality of green innovation by alleviating enterprises' financial constraints and giving full play to the internal and external information effect. (3) The discussion shows that the effect of digital finance is heterogeneous and can more significantly and effectively stimulate the green innovations of enterprises with lower analyst optimism bias and higher synchronicity.