Environmental Governance Effects of Digital Transformation:Evidence from Textual Analysis of Annual Reports of Listed Manufacturing Enterprises in China
With the gradual improvement of environmental governance performance,people's desire for envi-ronmental quality has also risen to a new height with the proposal of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals.It is increasingly difficult for traditional environmental regulation approaches to make breakthroughs.The existing studies find that digital technology has become a new driving force for promoting green develop-ment,and digital transformation has become an important way for enterprises to expand the boundary of envi-ronmental performance.On this basis,the present paper uses crawler technology to extract keywords associat-ed with"digital transformation"in the annual reports of listed enterprises to characterize the degree of digital transformation in manufacturing enterprises.Further,by using the data of listed A-share manufacturing enter-prises from 2008 to 2020,it empirically investigates the impact of digital transformation on the enterprise's environmental performance and its underlying mechanism.The findings show that the digital transformation of the manufacturing industry has significantly improved its environmental performance,and this conclusion still holds true when considering the endogeneity and conducting a series of robustness tests.The mechanism analysis shows that the positive impact is primarily achieved by promoting green technological innovation and alleviating internal financing constraints of enterprises.Heterogeneity analysis shows that the improve-ment is affected by not only the internal characteristics of enterprises such as property rights,enterprise size and industry attributes,but also by the external factors like the intensity of regional environmental regula-tion.The policy implications of this study are further advancing the digital transformation of enterprises,increasing disclosure of enterprises'environmental information,and reinforcing the governance effects of digital technology on enterprises'environmental performance.
digital transformationenterprise environmental performanceenvironmental governance effectgreen technology innovationfinancing constraints
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