At present, social capital is considered to be one of the important reasons for promoting economic development and causing regional economic differences, but in the existing research, there is little literature on the impact of regional social capital on enterprises’ green innovation behavior and green total factor productivity (GTFP), so this paper aims to enrich the research in this area. This paper builds a regional social capital evaluation index system and uses the super-SBM model to measure the enterprise GTFP. Then, this paper brings regional social capital, enterprise green innovation and GTFP into a unified framework for the first time and further reveals the quantitative relationship between the three by using OLS and Tobit two-step methods based on the panel data of 30 provinces from 2011 to 2019. The results show that regional social capital has a positive effect on enterprise GTFP and green innovation (except for strategic green innovation output), enterprise green innovation output has a positive role in promoting GTFP, and enterprise green innovation capital investment has a masking effect between regional social capital and GTFP. Furthermore, the expansive study finds that there are differences in the impact of regional social capital on green innovation and the GTFP of heterogeneous enterprises, and financing constraints have a positive regulatory effect on the relationship between regional social capital and the GTFP of state-owned enterprises, while having an inhibitory effect on the GTFP of private enterprises. Fiscal decentralization has a partial mediating effect between regional social capital and enterprise GTFP, while urbanization and CO₂ emissions have a masking effect. Additionally, this paper aims to provide a reference for the improvement of regional social capital theory, the strategic choice of green innovation of enterprises, and the high-quality development of the economy.

In the context of accelerating economic transformation and upgrading, and comprehensively promoting the construction of digital China and ecological civilization in China, this paper uses text mining and OLS to quantitatively study the relationship between fiscal decentralization, enterprise digital transformation and green innovation in 31 provinces from 2011 to 2021. This study finds that fiscal decentralization will promote enterprise green innovation and digital transformation, and that digital transformation has a partial mediating effect between fiscal decentralization and enterprise green innovation. Furthermore, this expansive study finds that fiscal decentralization has a positive role in promoting the green innovation of heterogeneous enterprises and enterprises in different regions, among which its promotion effect on state-owned enterprises is higher than that of private enterprises, and its promotion effect on enterprises in the central and western regions is higher than that of enterprises in the eastern region. Moreover, an inverted U-shaped relationship exists between fiscal decentralization and the green innovation of enterprise. In addition, financing constraints have a masking effect between fiscal decentralization and green innovation in enterprise and green innovation significantly promotes enterprise environmental, social and governance (ESG) development.

Investigating the relationship between digital innovation and carbon productivity, along with its underlying mechanisms, is important for advancing regional low-carbon, sustainable development. In this study, panel data spanning 2012 to 2022 from 30 provincial-level regions in China are analyzed utilizing mediation analysis and spatial Durbin models to systematically examine the transmission pathways, heterogeneous characteristics, and impact of digital innovation on carbon productivity. The findings reveal the following: (1) Digital innovation significantly enhances carbon productivity, exhibiting robust spatial spillover effects. (2) Spatial mediation analysis reveals that digital innovation enhances carbon productivity through three pathways—industrial structure upgrading, energy consumption efficiency, and technological progress—each exhibiting both local transmission and cross-regional spillover characteristics. (3) Regional heterogeneity analysis indicates that digital innovation exerts more substantial cross-regional spillover effects on carbon productivity in central and western regions than in eastern regions. Temporal heterogeneity analysis indicates that the effect of digital innovation on enhancing carbon productivity increased significantly after 2018. This study reveals the intrinsic logic and constraints governing digital innovation’s impact on carbon productivity, providing policymakers with a reference for formulating strategies to coordinate the development of digital and green economies.

Using panel data of Chinese A-share listed firms spanning 2013 to 2024, this paper investigates the statistical association between the disclosure–implementation mismatch in digital transformation and corporate ESG ratings. The disclosure–implementation mismatch is constructed as an empirical proxy capturing the divergence between firms’ digital-transformation disclosures in annual reports and their substantive digital inputs. We stress that this proxy can reflect multiple neutral sources of divergence, such as investment time lags and outsourcing arrangements, and should not be equated solely with managerial opportunism. Baseline regression results document a statistically significant negative association between this mismatch and corporate ESG ratings. Exploratory heterogeneity analyses show that such correlational pattern is more prominent among firms without Big-Four audits, firms located in high-marketisation regions, and firms with lower managerial ownership.

We examine whether lagged corporate sustainable growth (Pre-CSG) helps explain cross-firm differences in firm-specific risk responses as commodity futures market stress rises. Using Chinese commodity futures data, we construct a multidimensional Commodity Futures Market Stress Index (CFMSI) and relate it to Pre-CSG and firm-specific risk for Chinese A-share manufacturing firms. We find that firms with higher Pre-CSG exhibit weaker relative firm-specific risk responses as CFMSI rises, with the strongest evidence for downside idiosyncratic volatility. The economic magnitude is small: a one-standard-deviation increase in CFMSI combined with a one-standard-deviation difference in Pre-CSG corresponds to approximately a 0.056-percentage-point reduction in the annualized Downside IVOL differential, or about 0.25% of its sample mean. By contrast, Pre-CSG is not significantly associated with lower risk when CFMSI is around zero, the CFMSI reference-window mean, indicating a state-dependent rather than unconditional relation. The negative interaction is broadly preserved under alternative CFMSI constructions and additional predetermined firm controls, although statistical precision varies, and is further supported by alternative inference procedures and recursive future-stress timing tests. Complementary analyst evidence shows that the CFMSI × Pre-CSG Interaction Exposure is negatively associated with forecast disagreement in more restrictive specifications. In the baseline analyst-risk specification, greater disagreement is positively associated with firm-specific risk measured in the following calendar year; however, this association attenuates and loses statistical significance when disagreement is reconstructed using only forecasts issued before that risk window begins. Overall, our findings suggest that the relation between corporate sustainable growth and firm-specific risk varies with commodity futures market stress.