Impact of Environmental Regulation on Enterprise Green Innovation: Improvement or Inhibition?

The impact of environmental regulation on enterprise green innovation is intertwined with enterprise competitiveness and regional sustainable development. Taking China’s Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies from 2012 to 2022 as research samples, this paper explored the relationship between environmental regulation and enterprise green innovation based on theoretical perspectives such as principal-agent theory. The results show that environmental regulation can significantly promote the enterprise green innovation. Meanwhile, this paper introduced the speed of digital transformation as a moderating variable, and the proportion of fixed asset investment and R&D investment as mediating variables. Among the samples with differences in property rights and enterprise profitability, the impacts of environmental regulation on enterprise green innovation vary, and the conclusion passes the robustness test. With environmental regulation and enterprise green innovation brought into the same analysis framework, this paper expands the existing research, and puts forward corresponding suggestions and prospects.