Green data centre policy, executives’ cognition, and corporate energy efficiency

Drawing on an unbalanced firm-year panel linking Chinese A-share listed firms to prefecture-level cities from 2012 to 2024, this study employs a staggered difference-in-differences (DID) framework to systematically estimate the effect of green data centre policy on corporate energy efficiency and to clarify the underlying mechanisms. The results show that the policy significantly enhances firms’ energy efficiency. Mechanism analyses suggest that the effect operates primarily through two channels: improved ESG performance and policy-induced increases in firms’ green investment. Heterogeneity analyses indicate that the policy impact is stronger in resource-based cities, in more competitive industries, and among mature-stage firms. Moderating analyses further show that executives’ digital cognition tends to weaken the policy effect when considered alone; however, when executives simultaneously exhibit high levels of both green and digital cognition, their synergistic alignment yields a positive moderating effect. In addition, as successive pilot batches expand, the policy’s diffusion effect exhibits a nonlinear trajectory, increasing initially and then declining thereafter.