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Corporate green-technology innovation (GTI), an inevitable choice for sustainable development in China and the world, has attracted widespread attention in academic circles. However, prior studies have ignored the critical impact of informal institutions on GTI. The present study introduces the concept of regional integrity, as an important informal institution. It analyzes whether, how, and the extent to which levels of regional integrity can influence GTI in firms. Based on data derived from people known to have defaulted on orders issued by the Supreme People's Court and green patent-licensing data from listed companies between 2013 and 2020, we show that a decline in regional integrity levels can significantly inhibit GTI. We use instrumental-variable method to overcome a potential endogeneity problem; after a series of robustness tests, the conclusions remain valid. Further analysis shows that lower levels of regional integrity can hinder corporate GTI by reducing the willingness of firms to disclose environmental information and diminishing the impact of environmental regulations. We also find that, for firms whose directors and general managers do not hold concurrent posts, state-owned firms, and utility patents, lower levels of regional integrity have a more significant inhibitory effect on GTI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on China's government‐business relations theory, we use difference‐in‐differences and causal forest to find that local green finance policies can significantly enhance corporate ESG performance especially for nonstate‐owned companies, companies with high levels of executive social capital, non‐heavily polluting companies, and companies in developed regions. We also find that the corporate financing constraint mitigation effect and the regional environmental regulation effect of local green finance policies are important mechanisms for promoting corporate ESG performance. Additionally, local green finance policies can strengthen the positive role of corporate ESG performance in enhancing corporate value, which is conducive to corporate sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying CO2 emission from different perspectives is necessary for developing the effective mitigation policies for China. Previous studies mainly focus on exploring important sectors from production and consumption sides, while the perspective of betweenness has been neglected. For narrowing the gap, a new perspective for accounting the critical transmission sectors is discussed. In this study, we calculated and compared the CO2 emissions of production-based, consumption-based, and betweenness-based from 2012 to 2017 based on the multi-regional input–output (MRIO) model. A structural decomposition analysis (SDA) is conducted to uncover the driving forces of CO2 emissions change from three accounting principles. The Findings are as follows: (1) the heavy industry sector (559.26 Mt) in Shandong and Jiangsu (471.97 Mt), Power in Guangdong (83.77 Mt) and Beijing (199.24 Mt), Equipment in Jiangsu (213.88 Mt) are identified as the key transmission sectors; (2) the emission intensity effect and the final demand product structure effect contribute to CO2 emission decrease in China, which are largely offset by the structure effect of final demand source and the final demand scale effect. Based on this, we propose some typical policy implications, such as paying close attention to the production efficiency of the key transmission sectors, optimizing the intermediate product input structure and increasing investment in the technology level, and then reducing the intensity of carbon emission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]