Can Functional Industrial Policy Promote Digital–Green Synergy Development?

Against the backdrop of China’s high-quality development strategy, promoting the synergistic transformation of digitalization and greening in enterprises has become a critical pathway toward achieving sustainable economic and environmental development. This paper takes the MIC2025 as a quasi-natural experiment and constructs a multi-period difference-in-differences (DID) model to evaluate the policy’s impact on the digital–green synergy development (DGSD) of firms, using data from A-share listed companies in China from 2011 to 2022. The empirical results indicate that the implementation of MIC2025 significantly improves DGSD. This conclusion remains robust under a series of tests, including heterogeneous DID specifications, placebo tests, machine learning approaches, and instrumental variable estimation. Further heterogeneity analysis reveals substantial differences in policy effects across regions, city and firm characteristics. A mechanism analysis revealed that the MIC2025 policy effectively enhances corporate DGSD by alleviating financing constraints and incentivizing innovation in digital and green technologies. Additionally, companies in strategic industries exhibit a stronger DGSD growth momentum. This study provides both theoretical support and empirical analysis for understanding how functional industrial policy can promote digital–green synergy, offering valuable insights for policy implications and future research optimization.