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Low Carbon Economy 2025
Are Green Finance Policies Facilitating the Digital Transformation of Companies?
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Abstract:
The digital transformation of enterprises is one of the important ways to promote energy saving and emission reduction, thereby helping China achieve its goals of carbon peak and carbon neutrality from a micro perspective. Most of the existing literature focuses on the impacts of low-carbon city pilot policies on enterprises’ carbon emission reduction and green technology innovation capabilities, while the role of enterprise digital transformation has been relatively overlooked. This paper uses panel data of Chinese listed companies from 2000 to 2022 as a sample and employs empirical methods such as the fixed-effects model, propensity score matching (PSM), and difference-in-differences (DID) to investigate the impact and mechanisms of low-carbon city pilot policies on enterprise digital transformation. The study finds that the low-carbon city pilot policy positively promotes enterprise digital transformation, and this conclusion remains robust after a series of robustness tests and endogeneity treatments. Mechanism analysis reveals that the policy can promote digital transformation by alleviating firms’ financing constraints, while government capacity plays a positive moderating role in this relationship. Further heterogeneity analysis shows that the low-carbon city pilot policy has a more significant effect on the digital transformation of technology-intensive firms, non-heavy-polluting firms, and firms in the growth and maturity stages. This paper enriches the research on the mechanisms of enterprise digital transformation under the new era and provides empirical evidence for the top-level design of green finance policies and the realization path of promoting enterprise emission reduction and greening to build a Beautiful China under the conditions of the new development paradigm.
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