Smart city pilots, marketization processes, and substantive green innovation: A quasi-natural experiment from China

The world's major economies are striving to control carbon emissions and avoid irreversible impacts on the natural environment. Therefore, innovative green technologies are crucial for both government departments and the private sector as an important way to address carbon emissions. This study aims to investigate the link between the government's smart city construction and corporate green innovation and optimize the policy guidelines that drive green innovation in enterprises. This study analyzes 6,104 panels of Chinese listed companies from 2007-2019. An approach called the Differences-in-Differences model was applied to evaluate hypotheses. The empirical results suggest that smart city pilots drove substantial green innovation in businesses. The marketization process has a moderating effect on the impact of smart city pilots on substantive green innovation in enterprises. Moreover, marketization process has a threshold effect in smart city pilots influencing the substantive green innovation of enterprises, and the effect of smart city drivers influencing the substantive green innovation of enterprises increases significantly when regional marketization process reaches a certain level. The findings of this study provide valuable guidance for policy designers to promote corporate green innovation at both the hardware facility level and the market system level of cities when developing policies related to green innovation.