IJERPH | Free Full-Text | Does Digitization Promote Green Innovation? Evidence from China
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According to new institutional economics, intellectual property (IP) protection can influence corporate creativity by reducing the financial uncertainties of R&D and enhancing the effective allocation of R&D resources [55,56]. A company’s monopoly returns coming from innovation achievements are directly determined by the degree of IP protection [57]; that is, a region with a greater degree of intellectual property protection can constrain the replication and dissemination of innovation achievements by other innovation subjects more effectively, further protecting green creative achievements and raising expected returns for companies—a strong incentive for firms’ green innovative activities. Therefore, the positive impacts of digitalization on green innovation may vary with the different degrees of IP protection. We propose the following hypothesis:
The regional economic data stemmed from the Statistical Yearbook of each province. Our sample was processed as follows: (1) the samples in financial sectors are removed; (2) the sampled companies marked with ST, ST * and PT are counted out; and (3) the sampled companies with incomplete financial data are excluded. By doing so, our final sample includes 13,140 firm-year observations from across 2636 listed companies. The details of sample selection procedures are listed in Table 1. Additionally, all of the continuous variables were winsorized at the 1% and 99% levels.