Government Open Data and Green Collaborative Innovation: Firm-Level Evidence from China

The open sharing of data as a factor of production is an important institutional mechanism for promoting sustainable innovation in the digital economy. Using Chinese A-share listed firms as the research sample and exploiting the staggered rollout of government open data (GOD) platforms across prefecture-level cities as a quasi-natural experiment, this paper constructs a staggered difference-in-differences (DID) model to examine the effect of GOD on green collaborative innovation (GCI) and its underlying mechanisms. The results show that GOD significantly promotes GCI, indicating that open government data can help firms strengthen collaboration in green innovation and contribute to more sustainable development. Mechanism analysis shows that GOD promotes GCI through four channels: increasing government subsidies, reducing information asymmetry, raising public environmental awareness, and advancing corporate digital transformation. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the innovation-promoting effect of GOD is more pronounced in large cities, non-resource-based cities, and southern cities, and is more salient among state-owned enterprises, capital-intensive firms, and mature firms. This paper provides empirical evidence on the microeconomic effects of market-oriented data allocation and highlights the role of GOD in supporting GCI, corporate sustainable transformation, and the sustainable development of the digital economy.