Environmental governance in the digital era: Evidence from Chinese listed firms on pollution mitigation

The fast expansion of digital governance raises the critical question of whether digital government can successfully enhance corporate environmental performance, necessitating empirical investigation. This study employs panel data sourced from Chinese A - share listed companies from 2012 to 2023, conducting a systematic analysis of the mechanism by which digital government construction exerts an influence on corporate pollution emissions. Digital government substantially curtails corporate environmental behavior, and this impact persists across several robustness tests and endogeneity assessments. The mechanism analysis indicates that digital government influences the environmental behavior of enterprises through four avenues: augmenting environmental information disclosure, enhancing environmental protection investment, elevating ESG ratings, and reinforcing the focus on green strategy. Furthermore, the level of regional development, characteristics of industrial pollutants, Internet penetration rate, and company ownership structure significantly moderate policy impacts. This paper enhances empirical research on the correlation between digital governance and corporate green transformation, subsequently offering policy recommendations to refine the institutional framework of digital government, optimize information disclosure regulations, enhance the green incentive mechanism, and direct enterprises' environmental behaviors by category.