Has green innovation been improved by intelligent manufacturing?—Evidence from listed Chinese manufacturing enterprises

With the emergence of a new phase of industrial revolution, China has started to build a manufacturing development pattern based on intelligent and low-carbon economy. However, there is a lack of consensus on whether intelligent manufacturing fosters or hinders green innovation. We employed data from listed Chinese manufacturing enterprises, specifically those selected for intelligent manufacturing demonstration project (IMDP) from 2008 to 2021. We constructed a multi-period difference-in-differences (DID) to test the impact mechanism of IMDP on green innovation. We found that IMDP promotes green innovation and influences green innovation behaviours in enterprises. This finding satisfies a series of robustness tests, such as parallel trend test, PSM-DID, transforming the explained variables, endogeneity and placebo test. In addition, IMDP improves green innovation by reducing financing constraints, promoting green employment, increasing environmental subsidies, and enhancing environmental information disclosures. Moreover, IMDP creates varying impacts on green innovation across enterprises of different characteristics. The promotional effect is substantially evident when enterprises are larger, owned by non-heavily polluting industries, located in more economically developed eastern region, and facing stronger environmental regulations. Therefore, it is important to expand the scope of IMDP, ease enterprises' financing constraints, create more green jobs, and construct framework for environmental information disclosure.