Digital Transformation and Corporate Green Innovation: A Dynamic Capabilities Perspective with Financial Resource Availability as a Boundary Condition
Abstract
Firms can invest in digitalization without necessarily producing greener inventions; resource organization and financial continuity may determine whether that potential is realized. This paper studies 24,126 firm-year observations for Chinese A-share listed firms over 2013–2024. Annual-report vocabulary is used to gauge digital transformation, whereas applications for green invention and utility-model patents indicate green innovation. The empirical design estimates changes within firms through firm and year fixed effects and firm-clustered standard errors, with additional specifications that absorb industry-year and province-year shocks. Guided by dynamic capability theory, capability-related resource configuration (CRC) is constructed as a firm-year archival proxy from knowledge investment, resource-allocation flexibility, and specialized human-capital support, corresponding to the absorptive, adaptive, and innovative dimensions used in prior Chinese A-share research. Financial resource availability (FRA) is treated as a boundary condition on the CRC–green innovation relationship. Lagged and alternative digitalization measures, propensity score matching, and an instrumental-variable specification are used as supplementary checks. The estimates link greater digital transformation to more green innovation. CRC carries a positive indirect association of 0.002152, equivalent to 9.2231% of the total association, which places it as a partial rather than predominant pathway. At low FRA, the CRC slope cannot be distinguished statistically from zero; at average and high FRA, it is positive. Although the supplementary estimates preserve the baseline direction, the evidence does not warrant definitive causal claims. Overall, the findings are consistent with a resource-configuration interpretation in which financial continuity conditions the CRC–green innovation relationship.