Can central environmental protection inspection induce corporate green technology innovation?

As a major institutional innovation of China's environmental governance system, whether the central environmental protection inspection can induce green technology innovation in heavily polluting corporates is crucial to deepening the reform of China's environmental governance system. Based on corporate green patent data from 2010 to 2019, the Difference-in-difference model is used to test the impact of the central environmental protection inspection on corporate green technology innovation after theoretically analyzes. The study finds that the central environmental protection inspection has significantly stimulated the green technology innovation of pollution-intensive industrial companies, by, in the main, encouraging corporates to develop innovative practices which increase the utilization efficiency of fossil energy and decrease end process pollutant emissions. However, green innovations in new energy sources that radically reduce pollution emissions are not significant. In addition, the green technology innovation induced by the central environmental protection inspection is not a superposition effect based on existing innovation activities, but the result of a crowding out of other technological innovations.