Does Environmental Information Disclosure Affect the Sustainable Development of Enterprises: The Role of Green Innovation

Along with command-and-control and market-incentive environmental regulation policies, environmental information disclosure (EID) is an important measure used by the Chinese government to implement environmental governance. In the context of advocating for corporate sustainable development and green governance, this study uses data from China’s Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies in heavily polluting industries spanning 2008–2019 to empirically explore the relationship between corporate EID and green innovation (GI). The results reveal the following: (1) high-quality EID significantly promotes the absolute GI level and the relative GI level of enterprises. (2) An intermediary model found that the internal mechanism of corporate EID used to promote GI mainly comes from the government’s energy-saving innovation subsidy effect and the social media attention effect. (3) Corporate EID has a more evident promotional effect on green patents for energy conservation and green patents for inventions. (4) The EID of state-owned enterprises is more conducive to GI than to the activities of private enterprises. (5) The EID of enterprises in high-level administrative cities has no significant impact on GI. However, it has a significant promoting effect in low-level administrative cities. The research not only provides an empirical basis for China to improve the environmental information disclosure system of listed companies but also to offer guidance for companies to pursue green and sustainable development.