Green Credit Policies and Corporate Green Innovation: An Empirical Study Based on A-Share Listed Companies

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Amidst accelerated socioeconomic advancement, China faces intensifying environmental challenges that demand urgent institutional solutions. Theoretical analysis suggests that green credit policies, by integrating environmental criteria into financial decision-making, encourage corporations to internalize pollution externalities while creating economic incentives for technological innovation to offset compliance costs. To empirically examine the causal mechanisms through which this policy intervention affects corporate green innovation dynamics, this study employs the 2012 Green Credit Guidelines as a quasi-natural experiment, analyzing longitudinal data from Shanghai/Shenzhen A-share listed firms established after 2007. Results reveal that green credit implementation significantly enhances the green innovation outputs of listed enterprises through two main channels as follows: strengthening environmental accountability of executives and alleviating financing constraints. Notably, corporate digital transformation and social responsibility commitments emerge as crucial moderators that amplify the innovation-stimulating effects of policy. Furthermore, this study identifies substantial heterogeneity in policy impacts across firms with different ownership structures, governance capacities, and pollution intensities. These findings extend to a broader enterprise population via mechanism analysis, offering multidimensional policy insights for optimizing green credit systems.