Does corruption sand the wheels of sustainable development? Evidence through green innovation
研究腐败对绿色创新的影响，发现腐败显著抑制绿色创新，尤其对媒体和分析师关注度低的企业、非国有企业和重污染行业影响更大，支持了腐败阻碍可持续发展的观点。
Abstract This study investigates the impact of corruption on green innovation, as corruption may impede or foster green innovation in developing economies due to their weak governance systems. We develop a dataset of Chinese non‐financial firms listed between 2007 and 2020 and apply static and dynamic regression techniques. The results indicate a highly significant negative association between corruption and green innovation. This supports the notion that corruption culture reduces corporate legitimacy concerns ( institutional theory ), increases managerial rent‐seeking ( agency theory ), and hinders green innovation, thus impeding sustainable development and supporting the “ sand the wheels ” hypothesis. Our analysis also reveals that corruption's negative impact on green innovation is particularly significant for firms with lower media and analyst coverage, non‐state‐owned firms, and firms in heavy‐polluting industries. These results are robust to alternate proxies of green innovation and corruption as well as econometric specifications that account for endogeneity issues and industry, region, and time‐fixed effects.