Green Manufacturing and the Co-Evolution of Corporate Digitalization and Greening Transformation Systems: Evidence from China’s Green Factory Certification

The collaborative transformation of digitalization and greening has become a core trend for modern enterprises to build sustainable development systems. As a typical voluntary environmental regulation in China, green factory certification plays an important role in promoting the integration of digital technology and green production. Based on the unbalanced panel data of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2012 to 2022, this paper adopts a multi-period difference-in-differences model to empirically investigate the impact, internal mechanisms and heterogeneous characteristics of green factory certification on corporate digital-green collaborative transformation. The results show that green factory certification can significantly boost the level of corporate digital-green synergy, with an average policy effect of 2.07%. Mechanism tests confirm that this policy realizes the dual transformation through four core paths: stimulating green technological innovation, raising public environmental awareness, improving corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance and easing financing constraints. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the promotion effect varies distinctly across regions, enterprise life cycles, pollution types and executive backgrounds. This study reveals the systemic logic of voluntary environmental regulation enabling digital-green collaborative transformation, and provides empirical support and targeted policy suggestions for enterprises and governments to accelerate the integrated development of digitalization and greening.