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Abstract
Amid an increasingly severe environmental backdrop, green innovation has become a crucial direction for our country's development. Green bond policies, as market-based policy tools, play a significant role in alleviating financing pressures for green innovation and promoting environmental enhancement. This paper uses a sample of 4,484 A-share listed companies from 2009 to 2023 to empirically test and deeply analyze the impact and internal mechanisms of the "2021 Financial Institutions Green Finance Evaluation Scheme" on corporate environmental levels. The core innovations of this paper include: First, empirically investigating the impact and mechanism of the Scheme on corporate environment using a difference-in-differences model; Second, based on the baseline regression model, it empirically tests the Scheme's heterogeneous impact on corporate green innovation, and innovatively proposes that corporate R&D will transform into "strategic green innovation"; Third, from the perspective of information barriers, it innovatively proposes and tests the negative moderating role of digital technology in the aforementioned mechanism, indicating that the application of digital technology has enhanced firms' "strategic green innovation" under existing policies, and examined the heterogeneous effects of this mechanism in terms of equity structure and industry characteristics. The core conclusions of this paper indicate: (1) The implementation of the 2021 Scheme significantly enhanced corporate environmental levels; (2) The Scheme significantly reduced the development of corporate green utility patents, with firms more inclined to engage in "strategic green innovation," and the application of digital technology intensified this effect; (3) The aforementioned mechanism has differentiated impacts on firms with different equity structures and industry characteristics. Therefore, to further promote green bond policies, refine the green innovation regulatory framework, and actively eliminate information barriers between government and businesses, this paper provides scientific support for further promoting green bonds, improving the green innovation regulatory system, and eliminating information barriers between government and enterprises.