绿色金融政策能抑制高环境风险企业策略性绿色创新吗?OACHSSCD

Against the backdrop of building a green finance system and achieving a comprehensive green and low-carbon transition in the economy and society,green finance policy has become an important institutional tool for aligning financial resource allocation with environmental objectives and promoting corporate green transformation.By embedding environmental considerations into financing decisions,such a policy is expected to improve green innovation quality and guide firms away from symbolic compliance.However,whether the policy genuinely inhibits strategic green innovation remains an empirical question,especially for firms facing high environmental risks. Using data from A-share listed companies in China from 2012 to 2023 and treating the release of the Guidelines for Establishing the Green Financial System as an exogenous policy shock,this paper employs a difference-in-differences design to identify the policy effect.Firms classified as A-category industries under the Key Performance Indicators for Green Credit Implementation of the former China Banking Regulatory Commission are identified as high environmental risk firms.Strategic green innovation is measured by the share of authorized green patents that remain uncited within the observation window after controlling for patent-age bias.The findings show that green finance policy can inhibit strategic green innovation among high environmental risk firms.This conclusion holds after endogeneity analysis and a series of robustness checks. Mechanism analyses show that green finance policy operates through two channels.First,it intensifies financing constraints for high environmental risk firms,thereby weakening the resource base that sustains low-quality symbolic innovation.Second,it strengthens external and internal governance by improving information transparency and governance quality,thus reducing firms' incentives for opportunistic green innovation.Further analyses indicate that the policy effect is more pronounced in provincial-level regions with stronger environmental regulation,higher fiscal transparency,more developed green finance,and better marketization,as well as among privately owned firms.In addition,the reduction in strategic green innovation is accompanied by higher subsequent green innovation output. This paper provides new evidence on how green finance policy shapes firms' green innovation strategies under environmental constraints.It enriches the literature on strategic green innovation by focusing on high environmental risk firms and highlights the governance role of green finance as a policy tool that combines financial constraints with environmental regulation.The findings suggest that policymakers should improve green finance systems,strengthen financing screening and regulatory enforcement,enhance environmental information disclosure,and optimize regional governance conditions,thereby curbing greenwashing and encouraging more substantive and sustained green innovation.