| China’s rapid industrialization path has achieved remarkable economic success,while concentrating on encountering the last hundred years of pollution processes in developed countries and serious overall environmental pollution.Under the unbalanced development path,regional environmental pollution continues to diverge.Green innovation is an important tool for environmental pollution management and can achieve consistency between economic development and environmental governance.Alleviating the imbalance of green innovation between regions can help achieve economic and environmental equity.Finance is the bloodline of economic development and has a strong environmental impact.However,traditional financial development has produced a strong financial exclusion and mismatch problem.It cannot effectively exert capital effects to support the overall improvement of regional green innovation capacity,leading to further aggravation of regional environmental pollution disparities.In the context of the digital era,the rapid iterative update of differentiated digital technologies and the deep integration of homogeneous capital have given rise to a new digital financial model,which is disruptive to traditional finance,showing significant environmental and inclusive effects,and providing new opportunities to address imbalance in green innovation.Does digital finance development have a universal effect on regional green innovation of enterprises and can it alleviate regional green innovation imbalance? First,this paper compares the existing studies and analyzes the current situation of digital finance development and green innovation in each city in China.On the basis of measuring the green innovation capacity of each city,this paper further measures the Theil index of regional green innovation imbalance.Secondly,this paper analyzes the formation of regional green innovation imbalance on the basis of innovation geography theory,and analyzes the possibility and transmission mechanism of digital finance development to alleviate regional green innovation imbalance with the help of latecomer advantage theory and long tail theory.This paper analyzes the overall impact of digital finance development on green innovation imbalance and the transmission mechanism between the two using panel data of 285 cities in China from 2011-2018 and combining the Peking University Digital Inclusive Finance Index as a measure of digital finance development level.Further,the paper analyzes the heterogeneous effects of factors such as regionally different governmental governance capacity and digital divide.It is found that(1)digital finance development can significantly alleviate green innovation imbalance under the overall static impact analysis,and the finding still holds under a series of robustness tests.(2)Under the quantile model analysis,the greater the degree of regional green innovation imbalance,the better the effect of digital finance.(3)Under the dynamic process analysis,the inhibitory effect of digital finance on regional green innovation imbalance comes from the catch-up effect,i.e.,the marginal effect of digital finance on regions with inferior green innovation is greater.(4)Under heterogeneity analysis,when regions face strict financial regulation and environmental constraints,digital finance development can more effectively alleviate green innovation imbalance;higher local government governance capacity and smaller digital divide help to better utilize the positive effects of digital finance.(5)Under the mechanism analysis,digital finance development can alleviate inter-regional green credit imbalance,break market segmentation,and increase environmental protection expenditures,thus narrowing the inter-regional green innovation capacity gap.The findings of this paper enrich the research related to the field of digital finance development and green innovation,and provide references for improving digital finance development strategies and regional coordinated development. |
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