The Impact of Green Finance Policies on Green Total Factor Productivity in Strategic Emerging Industry Firms: A Study on the Catalytic Effect

Abstract

Existing research on the effects of green finance policy suffers from two primary limitations. Firstly, it predominantly focuses on how these policies "force" heavily polluting enterprises to transition, while overlooking their "enabling" effect on Strategic Emerging Industries (SEIs), which are key agents of green development. Secondly, the mechanistic analysis is often confined to a static perspective, lacking an in-depth examination of the policy's dynamic transmission pathways. To address these research gaps, this paper utilizes the Green Finance Reform and Innovation Pilot Zones policy as a quasi-natural experiment. Based on data from A-share listed companies within SEIs from 2011 to 2023, we construct a multi-period Difference-in-Differences (DID) model for systematic investigation. Our findings reveal that: First, the policy significantly enhances corporate Green Total Factor Productivity (GTFP). Second, this effect is realized through a chain-mediating pathway of "alleviating financing constraints → driving green innovation." Third, the policy's impact exhibits structural heterogeneity; it leads to significant improvements in technology-intensive and non-highly polluting enterprises, but has a limited effect on highly polluting, labor-intensive, and asset-intensive enterprises. Fourth, environmental regulation exerts a positive moderating effect, creating a synergistic "guidance + forcing" dynamic. This study provides micro-level evidence for understanding the "enabling" mechanism of green finance and emphasizes that policy design must be precisely coordinated with firms' intrinsic characteristics and the external institutional environment.