Does Green Finance Drive Green Employment Growth? Evidence from China’s Provincial Panel Data

Under the context of global carbon neutrality goals, green finance has emerged as a pivotal tool for promoting low-carbon economic transitions and reshaping labor market dynamics. Different from existing studies that only verify the single positive net effect of green finance on green employment, this study systematically examines the dual employment adjustment effects of green finance, including green job increment and traditional high-carbon job displacement. Based on provincial panel data from 2000 to 2023, this study constructs a multi-dimensional green finance index covering market and policy dimensions, and adopts two-way fixed effects, DID causal identification, mediation analysis, and spatial Durbin model. The empirical results show that green finance significantly boosts regional green employment, and green human capital plays a strict sequential partial mediating role in the transmission process. Furthermore, green finance exhibits obvious positive cross-regional spatial spillover effects on green employment growth. This study further quantifies the offset mechanism between emerging green employment increment and traditional employment loss, and decomposes the direct and spatial spillover contribution of green finance, which remedies the empirical one-sidedness and spatial perspective deficiency of prior studies, and provides targeted policy implications for coordinating low-carbon transformation and stable green employment growth.