Green investor behavior and corporate green innovation: Evidence from Chinese listed companies.

Businesses embracing green innovation can encourage high-quality green economic development in addition to reducing emissions. In this paper, we use the Difference-in-Differences (DID) to investigate the influence of green investor behavior on the green innovation of companies, using the first-ever green investor investment in a company as a quasi-natural experiment. According to research, green investors have the power to accelerate corporate green innovation greatly. Three key strategies that green investors can use to do this include raising institutional investment levels, enhancing the green perception of executives, and bringing in top talent. Heterogeneity analysis shows that non-high-polluting, big, and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are more likely to benefit from green investors' green innovation effects. Further analysis reveals that (ⅰ) green investors' influence on an enterprise's level of green innovation can help it improve its ESG ratings; (ii) green investors can encourage green innovation in source control but have little effect on green innovation in end-of-pipe treatment; (ⅲ) green investors can support both non-green and green innovation in enterprises, but have a greater influence on green innovation. This study strengthens the micro relationship between green investors and corporate green innovation. It also supports the theoretical underpinnings of corporate green innovation, which is significant for advancing green innovation, environmental protection, and high-quality economic development in emerging economies.

A spatio-temporal perspective of China's industrial circular economy development.

The circular economy pattern is the key to solve the contradiction between industrial development and resource protection. Based on the principle of the "3Rs" of the circular economy (reduction, reuse, and resource utilization), and combined with the characteristics of industrial and provincial circular economy development from the perspective of material flow analysis, this study constructs an evaluation index system of industrial circular economy in China's provinces. A combination of the global entropy and the coefficient of variation methods is used to calculate the comprehensive index of industrial circular economy development. Furthermore, this study analyzes the development of China's provincial industrial circular economy from the two dimensions of time and space. The results show that China's industrial circular economy developed rapidly during the Eleventh and Twelfth Five-Year Plan periods. Resource output, resource consumption, and resource reuse and waste disposal have improved over time, but the outlook for emissions of major pollutants is not optimistic. China's industrial circular economy has significant spatial correlation and obvious regional differences, since the development of the circular economy requires a large amount of capital input, and the capacity of capital input fundamentally depends on the regional economic situation. Therefore, the spatial agglomeration pattern of China's industrial circular economy is roughly the same as that of China's economic development. Eastern China has the fastest development, followed by the central and northeast regions, while the western region, especially the northwest, lags the other regions.