How Does Public Environmental Concern Affect Corporate Green Innovation?

This study investigates the impact of the rising public environmental concern on cooperate green innovation in China using a firm-level fixed effects model. It includes 41,881 Chinese A-share listed firms from 2010 to 2024. Data are obtained from the Baidu search index and the CNRDS green patent database. The results show that public environmental attention can promote corporate green innovation. Heterogeneity analyses show that this positive impact is substantially stronger for financially constrained firms. This indicates that environmental attention serves as a critical external pressure that motivates green innovation under financing constraints. Also, state-owned enterprises respond more strongly to environmental attention than non-state-owned firms.