Intelligent Manufacturing Leads the Green Trend: An Empirical Exploration of Manufacturing Companies Listed on China's Shanghai and Shenzhen A-Share Markets
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Abstract
In the transformative era of industry driven by intelligent manufacturing, its capacity to shape corporate environmental responsibility stands as a critical concern. This study draws upon a decade of data from manufacturing firms listed on China's Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share markets, encompassing the years 2010 to 2022. Employing a two-way fixed-effects model, an empirical examination is conducted to assess the influence of intelligent manufacturing on investments in corporate environmental governance. The results reveal a significant and positive impact of intelligent manufacturing on the enhancement of corporate environmental governance investment, with the key driver being the increased investment in technological innovation by corporations. To substantiate the robustness of these findings, a series of rigorous checks were applied, encompassing two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimation, propensity score matching (PSM), the lagging of independent variables, and the system generalized method of moments (System GMM). Even amidst these exacting evaluations, the conclusions of the study have proven to be consistently robust. The implications of this research are dual-fold: it offers empirical evidence to guide corporate strategies in the domain of intelligent manufacturing and provides policymakers with a theoretical framework to advocate for industry greening and the formulation of sustainable environmental policies. This study, therefore, contributes to both the corporate strategy discourse and the policy-making arena by providing insights grounded in evidence of the pivotal role intelligent manufacturing plays in advancing environmental stewardship.
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