Does artificial intelligence suppress firms' greenwashing behavior? Evidence from robot adoption in China

IF 13.6 2区经济学 Q1 ECONOMICS

Energy Economics Pub Date : 2025-02-01 DOI:10.1016/j.eneco.2024.108168

Caiquan Bai , Di Yao , Qihang Xue

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Determining approaches to effectively suppress firms' greenwashing practices has become a popular topic in academic and professional circles. Given that artificial intelligence (AI) applications in production are mainly achieved using industrial robots, we investigate the impact of AI applications on firms' greenwashing behavior using industrial robot data from the International Federation of Robotics and data from Chinese listed firms from 2011 to 2019. The results demonstrate that AI applications can significantly suppress firms' greenwashing practices. We also identify three key mechanisms through which AI achieves this effect by reducing costs and increasing profits, improving productivity, and alleviating information asymmetry. Furthermore, the inhibitory effect of AI applications on firms' greenwashing behavior is more significant for firms with insufficient cash flow, firms without bank relationships, and those located in regions with good institutional environments and high human capital levels. This study provides a new perspective for suppressing firms' greenwashing practices by promoting AI applications, filling gaps in the existing literature.

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来源期刊

Energy Economics ECONOMICS-

CiteScore

18.60

自引率

12.50%

发文量

524

期刊介绍： Energy Economics is a field journal that focuses on energy economics and energy finance. It covers various themes including the exploitation, conversion, and use of energy, markets for energy commodities and derivatives, regulation and taxation, forecasting, environment and climate, international trade, development, and monetary policy. The journal welcomes contributions that utilize diverse methods such as experiments, surveys, econometrics, decomposition, simulation models, equilibrium models, optimization models, and analytical models. It publishes a combination of papers employing different methods to explore a wide range of topics. The journal's replication policy encourages the submission of replication studies, wherein researchers reproduce and extend the key results of original studies while explaining any differences. Energy Economics is indexed and abstracted in several databases including Environmental Abstracts, Fuel and Energy Abstracts, Social Sciences Citation Index, GEOBASE, Social & Behavioral Sciences, Journal of Economic Literature, INSPEC, and more.