Climate change risk has significant impacts on corporate financial activities. Using firm-level data from A-share listed companies in China from 2010 to 2022, we examine how climate risk affects corporate debt financing capacity. We find that climate change risk significantly weakens firms’ ability to raise debt, leading to lower leverage and higher financing costs. These results remain robust across various checks for endogeneity and alternative specifications. We also show that reducing corporate carbon emission intensity can mitigate the negative impact of climate risk on debt financing, suggesting that supply-side credit policies are more effective than demand-side capital structure choices. Furthermore, we identify three channels through which climate risk impairs debt capacity: reduced competitiveness, increased default risk, and diminished resilience. Our heterogeneity analysis reveals that these adverse effects are more pronounced for non-state-owned firms, firms with weaker internal controls, and companies in highly financialized regions, and during periods of heightened environmental uncertainty. We also apply textual analysis and machine learning to the measurement of climate change risks, partially mitigating the geographic biases and single-dimensional shortcomings inherent in macro-level indicators, thus enriching the quantitative research on climate change risks. These findings provide valuable insights for policymakers and financial institutions in promoting corporate green transition, guiding capital allocation, and supporting sustainable development.

Enhancing the persistence of corporate green innovation is crucial for promoting sustainable societal development. As big data technologies and related policies advance, digitalization emerges as an effective enabler of green innovation in enterprises. This study, grounded in resource-based theory and corporate ecology theory, examines the impact of national-level big data pilot zone reforms on the persistence of corporate green innovation, utilizing data from China’s A-share-listed companies from 2011 to 2021. It also explores the moderating effect of green finance development. Empirical results indicate that (1) the implementation of national-level big data pilot zones positively influences the persistence of green innovation, with robustness and endogeneity tests confirming these findings. (2) The development of regional green finance positively moderates this relationship. (3) A mediation analysis reveals that national-level big data policies enhance innovation persistence by alleviating financing constraints, promoting talent aggregation, and facilitating industrial upgrading. (4) The heterogeneity analysis shows that the positive impact of these reforms is more pronounced in non-state-owned, non-heavy polluting firms, those receiving high subsidies, and in regions with stringent environmental regulations. This study offers a novel theoretical perspective on and empirical evidence for digital transformation from the angle of national policy, supporting societal green development and contributing to policy enhancement aimed at achieving sustainable growth.

This study examines how supply chain structure diversification drives high-quality enterprise development in the digital economy. Using panel data from Chinese listed non-financial firms (2009–2023), we find that diversification of both suppliers and customers significantly improves firms’ total factor productivity (TFP), and the results remain robust after controlling for endogeneity. Mechanism analyses show that diversification enhances innovation capability, sustainability performance, and risk resilience, while digital supply chains strengthen these effects by improving information flow and coordination. Heterogeneity tests reveal that the impact is greater for firms with higher operational efficiency, cultural synergy, and information transparency. Overall, the findings highlight that diversified and digitally integrated supply chains are essential for innovation-driven, resilient, and sustainable enterprise growth.

In recent years, more and more research has focused on the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on business activities. Due to the existence of two different theoretical perspectives, shareholder value theory and managerial opportunism theory, the research on CSR has reached different conclusions. Meanwhile, the motivations for environmental investments in enterprises have received attention from scholars. However, there is a lack of empirical research on the relationship between CSR and environmental investment. Therefore, this study conducts a regression analysis on the external evaluation of CSR and enterprises’ environmental investment using data from Chinese listed companies. The empirical results show a significant positive relationship between the external evaluation of CSR and enterprises’ environmental investment. The mediating tests conducted based on information transmission and resource acquisition mechanisms explain the reasons for this promotion effect, supporting the shareholder value theory. Furthermore, our research finds that this promotion effect is more significant in non-state-owned enterprises, enterprises receiving fewer environmental subsidies, enterprises disclosing environmental philosophies, and enterprises identified as key pollution-monitoring units in reports. The research findings of this study are meaningful for clarifying the economic consequences of CSR and provide practical evidence for Chinese enterprises to understand the importance of environmental investment and the government’s advocacy for enterprises to proactively engage in environmental investment.

The construction of the innovation ecosystem plays an important role in the technology research and development activities of innovation-oriented enterprises. How to effectively promote the perfection of enterprise innovation ecology determines the quality of engineering technology activities of innovation-oriented enterprises. Entrepreneurs play a key role in enterprise innovation ecological construction, especially in resource allocation. Therefore, based on the Upper Echelon Theory, this paper investigates the “age” effect of enterprise innovation ecological construction under the influence of top managers and its economic consequences under the adjustment of various heterogeneous factors. Based on this, this paper selects the data of GEM listed companies from 2009 to 2017 as samples, uses STATA14.0 for an empirical test, constructs an OLS model with quadratic terms, and uses multiple grouping variables for a grouping regression test. The main results show that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between the entrepreneurs’ age and R&D investment, that is, due to the influence of entrepreneurs, there is a midlife crisis in R&D investment behaviors of enterprises; the test of gender grouping shows that female entrepreneurs alleviate this crisis. The conclusion of this paper reveals the influence of entrepreneur’s age on enterprise innovation activities, and puts forward the important role that female managers may play in R&D activities, which provides managers with references for improving the technical level and engineering quality of innovation-oriented enterprises.