Green innovation and carbon emission performance: The role of digital economy

Improving carbon emission performance contributes to climate change mitigation, and green innovation may help achieve this goal. Digital economy may promote the diffusion and application of green innovation. Thus, we explore how digital economy affects the impact of green innovation on carbon emission performance based on the panel data covering 240 cities in China from 2005 to 2019. System-generalized method of moments (SYS-GMM), the two stage least square method (2SLS), and the panel quantile regression approach are adopted. The results show that, (1) Green innovation improves carbon emission performance. (2) The digital economy (digital development carrier, digital industrialization, industry digitization, digital development environment) promote the positive impact of green innovation on carbon emission performance. (3) The specifical digital economy elements, such as new digital infrastructure, communication business and services industrialization, service digitalization, institutional and innovation environment also have the positive role. (4) For the mechanism, digital economy is conducive to green innovation for lower energy consumption scale, higher energy efficiency, and cleaner energy structure, thus improving carbon emission performance. (5) Asymmetric analyses imply that green innovation improves carbon emission performance better with developed digital economy.