From Green to Intelligent: How Does Green Credit Policy Shape Firms’ Digital Technology Investment?

Vollständiger Abstract

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Against the backdrop of the coordinated advancement of China’s “dual-carbon” goals and the national “Digital China” strategy, whether green financial policy can promote corporate digital transformation through resource reallocation has become an important question for high-quality development. Drawing on the resource-based view and financing-constraint theory, this study uses micro-level data on Chinese listed firms to evaluate how green credit policy affects corporate digital technology investment and its structural composition. Treating the 2012 Green Credit Guidelines as a common policy shock with differential exposure across environmentally sensitive industries, the baseline estimates show that green credit policy significantly increases firms’ overall digital technology investment, significantly reduces technical-personnel intensity, and significantly increases digital-asset intensity. This asymmetric pattern indicates that green credit policy affects not only the overall level of digital technology investment but also its internal structure. A standardized composition measure, COMP = z(DAI) − z(TI), further confirms a significant shift toward digital assets relative to technical personnel. The baseline findings are robust to a range of alternative specifications, inference procedures, and identification checks. Financing-cost and financing-constraint tests provide evidence consistent with an asset-substitution channel, while the mechanism analysis is interpreted cautiously rather than as strict causal mediation. Heterogeneity analysis and the green-innovation extension are supplemented with formal coefficient-difference tests. Overall, the findings show that green credit policy promotes digital technology investment while inducing a structurally asymmetric reallocation from technical personnel toward digital assets.