Dynamic impact of corporate green development strategies on green total factor productivity

Using a sample of 1831 listed companies from Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share markets spanning 2012 to 2022, this study grounds in the resource-based view (RBV) and attention-based view (ABV) and systematically examines the dynamic impacts of corporate green development strategy on green total factor productivity (GTFP). After effectively addressing self-selection bias through entropy balancing difference-in-differences (EB-DID) and the Heckman two-stage model, the results demonstrate that green strategies significantly enhance GTFP overall. Green bonds, functioning as hard external constraints, empower management with strong long-cycle strategic execution capacity by moderately reducing equity checks and balances. Green factories drive efficiency gains by deepening internal green strategic orientation, while substantive green innovation directly improves environmental performance through technological advancement. In particular, this study identifies two critical non-linear features in strategy implementation. First, it provides the first empirical confirmation that concurrent implementation of multiple green strategies generates significant substitution and crowding-out effects under the rigid constraints of capital pools and managerial bandwidth. Second, continuous interaction and dynamic lag models are employed to provide verification of the innovation compensation effect. Furthermore, heterogeneity analysis reveals that executive green cognition, the stage of corporate green transformation and environmental information disclosure quality significantly moderate the conversion boundaries and directional effects of green strategies. This research substantially extends the application of corporate governance, resource constraints and strategic management theories in the domain of sustainable development, and provides rigorous empirical evidence and practical insights for enterprises to dynamically orchestrate green resources, and for governments to formulate tiered differentiated green incentive policies.