Green Factory Certification and Corporate Innovation Efficiency: Evidence from Chinese Manufacturing Firms

Abstract

China has entered a new stage of green and low-carbon transition and high-quality economic development. As major actors in the national economy, firms bear substantial responsibility for advancing the green transition and the high-quality development of manufacturing. How policy interventions can stimulate corporate innovation is therefore an important question in both the evaluation of environmental regulation and related theoretical research. Using data on manufacturing firms listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share markets from 2007 to 2020, this study treats the first five batches of green factories announced by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology as a quasi-natural experiment. The results show that green factory certification significantly improves corporate innovation efficiency, and the finding remains robust to winsorization, lagged control variables, placebo tests, alternative fixed-effects specifications, and adjustments to clustered standard errors. These findings clarify the innovation consequences of green factory certification and support differentiated policy design based on firm ownership and governance capacity.