DOES INDUSTRY-EDUCATION INTEGRATION DRIVE CORPORATE GREEN INNOVATION? AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF ITS ECOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS IN CHINA

Green innovation is important for firms’ transition toward sustainable development, but it is often constrained by financing frictions and shortages of specialized human capital. Existing studies have mainly examined financial incentives or human-capital policies separately, leaving limited evidence on whether policies that integrate education and industry can jointly relax these constraints. Motivated by this gap, this study asks whether industry-education integration can promote corporate green innovation by jointly relaxing financing and human-capital constraints. We use China’s National Pilot City of Industry-Education Integration policy as a quasi-natural experiment and examine its effect on green patent applications among Chinese A-share listed firms from 2016 to 2023. The central research question is whether firms located in pilot cities experience a stronger increase in green innovation after the 2021 pilot designation than comparable firms located in non-pilot cities. Results show that the Industry-Education Integration from NPCIEI policy leads to an approximate 10.3% increase in green patent grants for firms in pilot cities relative to non-pilot cities. This effect is more prominent for non-SOEs, high-competition industries, high marketization regions. Mechanism analysis further document that NPCIEI policy promotes green innovation by a financing alleviation effect and a human capital accumulation effect. Overall, the findings provide patent-based evidence that industry-education integration can support firm-level green innovation by jointly improving financial and human-capital conditions.