Green finance and green innovation: the Moderating role of ESG and synergies with inclusive finance

Rui Bai, Huixuan Wu, Zhizhou Tan and Tao Hong

Research in International Business and Finance, 2025, vol. 79, issue C

Abstract: Green innovation is a key path to promoting and realizing long-term sustainable development. Whether and how China's green finance policy and inclusive finance policy affect firms' green innovation capacity is important for promoting sustainable development. Analysis of publicly traded firms' data (2013–2022), employing a moderated mediation model with a difference-in-differences design, reveals green finance elevates corporate green innovation. By increasing environmental protection subsidies, the green finance strategy effectively enhances businesses' potential for green innovation. ESG scores positively moderated green finance policy enhancing the green innovation of corporates and enhanced the accuracy of environmental subsidies. The synergistic effect of green finance policy and inclusive finance policy enhances green innovation in non-heavily polluting, state-owned, and non-state-owned firms, and there is a substitution effect between ESG and dual policies in non-heavily polluting and non-state-owned firms. Our study delves into green finance and inclusive finance policies and reveals how they can effectively contribute to the enhancement of firms' green innovation capabilities providing valuable empirical support and targeted policy recommendations for reaching the SDGs.

Keywords: Green finance policy; Inclusive finance policy; Corporate green innovation; Environmental subsidies; ESG (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0275531925003125
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:riibaf:v:79:y:2025:i:c:s0275531925003125

DOI: 10.1016/j.ribaf.2025.103056

Access Statistics for this article

Research in International Business and Finance is currently edited by T. Lagoarde Segot

More articles in Research in International Business and Finance from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().