This paper examines how mandatory CSR information disclosure affects corporate green innovation. The analysis exploits China's mandate in 2008 which requires firms to disclose CSR activities, and uses a difference-in-difference method to do the empirical analysis. The results reveal that the treat firms exhibit an increase in green innovation subsequent to the mandate which supports Porter's hypothesis with the positive role of environmental regulations. On average, after the policy implementation, the firms in the list generate 2.193–2.244 more green invention patents than those if not in the list. In addition, the impact of mandatory CSR disclosure is heterogeneous on different types of firms. Firms with large size, state-owned firms and firms in pollution-intensive industries are more likely to be affected by mandate, which suggests that these firms are more sensitive to the mandatory information disclosure.

As a key input factor in industrial production, the price volatility of crude oil often brings about economic volatility, so forecasting crude oil price has always been a pivotal issue in economics. In our study, we constructed an LSTM (short for Long Short-Term Memory neural network) model to conduct this forecasting based on data from February 1986 to May 2021. An ANN (short for Artificial Neural Network) model and a typical ARIMA (short for Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average) model are taken as the comparable models. The results show that, first, the LSTM model has strong generalization ability, with stable applicability in forecasting crude oil prices with different timescales. Second, as compared to other models, the LSTM model generally has higher forecasting accuracy for crude oil prices with different timescales. Third, an LSTM model-derived shorter forecast price timescale corresponds to a lower forecasting accuracy. Therefore, given a longer forecast crude oil price timescale, other factors may need to be included in the model.

How to promote renewable energy investment is central to energy transformation and green development. To take China’s “green credit guidelines” policy as a quasi-natural experiment, we investigate the impacts of green credit policy on renewable energy investment. Using the samples of 1021 Chinese listed enterprises during 2007–2017, we find that: Firstly, the introduction of the green credit guidelines has promoted renewable energy investment. Secondly, short-term debts play a mediating role in the impacts of green credit guidelines on renewable energy investment, while long-term debts play a masking role, and financing constraints do not play a significant role. Thirdly, the heterogeneous impacts on renewable energy investment are reflected in different ownerships and enterprise scales, with significant impacts on the state-owned enterprises and small ones.