Assessing the Impact of Green Innovation on Corporate Sustainable Development

Under the background of increasingly prominent environmental problems, exploring the impact of green innovation on the sustainable development ability of enterprises not only can expand the boundary of the research on the factors influencing enterprises’ sustainable development ability and the economic consequences of green innovation but also can provide reference for the decision-making of the listed companies. On the basis of the manual collection of green innovation patent data from China National Intellectual Property Administration, this paper selects the Chinese A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2018 as the research subject and empirically tests the impact of green innovation on the corporate sustainable development ability. The results show that the output of green innovation significantly improves the corporate sustainable development ability. This result is economically significant. Specifically, a one–standard deviation increase (0.8147) of GI translates into a sustainable growth rate of 20.78 percentage points (0.0175*0.8147/0.0686) higher. The relationship between the output of green innovation and corporate sustainable development ability is more significant when the corporate social responsibility performance is worse or scientific research ability is weaker. A series of robustness test results show that the conclusions are reliable. Further test shows that green innovation plays a more significant role in enhancing the corporate sustainable development ability in non–state-owned enterprises. In addition, only invention patents of green innovation can significantly improve the corporate sustainable development ability, whereas non-invention patents cannot affect it. This paper provides a new perspective for the research on the factors affecting the corporate sustainable development ability. Furthermore, the research conclusions of this paper are of reference significance both in theory and practice.