Spillover Effects of Carbon Emission Trading on the Green Supply-Chain Finance Network

Against the backdrop of China’s deepening “dual-carbon” strategy, this paper systematically evaluates the spillover effects of Carbon Emission Trading (CET) on the Green Supply-Chain Finance Network (GSCFN). We first construct a three-tier transmission framework—“technological innovation → financing environment → chainwide collaboration”—to reveal, in theory, how CET price signals reallocate capital and diffuse across supply-chain nodes. Using a balanced panel of 420 listed manufacturing and power-sector firms from 2015–2023 and a fixed-effects model, we find: (i) a 0.1-unit increase in CET intensity raises green patent output by 0.8–1.0 items (p < 0.05); (ii) monetising carbon assets lowers green-loan interest rates by 38–45 basis points and boosts the supply-chain collaboration index by 2.4–3.1 percentage points; (iii) carbon-price stability significantly moderates firms’ green-investment willingness, and cross-regional tests confirm heterogeneous capital flows under different ETS designs. This study extends the literature at the intersection of carbon-market externalities and supply-chain finance, offering empirical support for carbon-market design and corporate practice under the dual-carbon goal. Policy recommendations include (a) a carbon-price corridor to stabilise expectations, (b) acceptance of carbon-asset income rights as collateral, and (c) leveraging leading firms’ contractual externalities to drive upstream- and downstream-level decarbonisation. Future work could employ spatial econometrics and network models, incorporating dynamic ESG scores and on-site verification data to depict cross-chain and cross-regional diffusion speed and intensity more precisely.