Affiliation:
1. College of Management Science Chengdu University of Technology Chengdu China
2. School of Economics and Management Fuzhou University Fuzhou China
Abstract
AbstractGreen innovation has been attracting much attention from academia and practice, but the influence of religion as an important informal institutional factor has not been fully investigated in existing studies. Taking Chinese listed companies from 2008 to 2019 as a sample, this study attempts to examine the relationship between religious atmosphere and corporate green innovation performance. The empirical results indicate that a religious atmosphere (Buddhism and Taoism as a whole) can significantly improve corporate green innovation performance, particularly high‐quality green innovation. The positive association between religion and green innovation performance is attenuated by pervasive formal institutions (i.e., environmental regulation), indicating that there is a substitutive effect between religion and formal institutions. We also find that Taoism mainly supports these results, while Buddhism has a limited impact, showing that there is a heterogeneous effect between different religions. We further find that the positive impact of religious atmosphere on green innovation performance is more pronounced in low‐governance enterprises and low‐polluting industries. This study contributes to research on the antecedents of corporate green innovation and the consequence of religion, which is of great significance to the value of religion in business practice.
Funder
National Natural Science Foundation of China
National Social Science Fund of China
Subject
Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law,Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management,Economics and Econometrics,Philosophy,Business and International Management