Resource Dependence and Uneven Green Innovation Responses to Green Finance: Evidence from China’s Initial Pilot Cohort

Green finance reforms may elicit different green invention responses across places with different inherited production structures. We examine the green finance reform and innovation pilot zones using a panel of 282 Chinese prefecture-level cities (2011–2024), with the main comparison drawn from the eight cities in the initial treatment cohort (three resource-based and five non-resource-based). Full-sample staggered-treatment estimators yield mixed diagnostics, motivating a common-timing difference-in-difference-in-differences design. The estimated resource–response differential is −0.657 log points (Webb wild-cluster p = 0.0049); the resource-city marginal response is imprecisely estimated rather than established as zero. The differential remains negative under province-by-year effects, alternative controls, and mapped-area exclusions, although saturated baseline-characteristic adjustments reduce its precision. Conventional and Webb pre-treatment tests disagree. An HonestDiD analysis shows that the confidence interval includes zero under modest departures from parallel trends, limiting a strong causal interpretation. Synthetic difference-in-differences fits pre-policy outcomes more closely in non-resource-based than resource-based cities. Pre-reform firm data indicate more concentrated brown-industry assets in resource-based cities but do not establish a mechanism. The results provide suggestive initial-cohort evidence of uneven responses to pilot designation, not direct evidence that green finance volumes or capability redeployment mediated the difference.