ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain.
Sec. Sustainable Organizations
Volume 6 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frsus.2025.1664916
This article is part of the Research TopicGreen entrepreneurship and waste management: strategies and policies for future sustainable and circular economyView all 4 articles
Cross-border E-commerce and Enterprise Green Innovation
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (UCASS), Beijing, China
- 2Peking University, Beijing, China
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The rapid development of cross-border e-commerce has not only helped businesses expand into international markets but also facilitated technological exchanges and resource sharing among enterprises, ultimately promoting green innovation. This study is based on data from Chinese listed companies from 2013 to 2023, utilizing web scraping technology to extract corporate announcements and employing a cross-border e-commerce keyword dictionary to identify specific time points when companies engaged in cross-border e-commerce activities. These time points are treated as policy shock events, and a difference-in-differences model is employed for empirical analysis. The findings reveal that engaging in cross-border e-commerce significantly enhances a company's level of green innovation. Mechanism analysis indicates that cross-border e-commerce indirectly promotes increases in green patent applications by alleviating firms' financial constraint and promoting their digital transformation, while environmental information disclosure also plays a positive moderating role. Heterogeneity analysis shows that this promotional effect is more pronounced among high-tech enterprises, firms in high-pollution industries, large state-owned enterprises, and companies in China's central and western regions. The study's conclusions provide a reference for enterprises to achieve sustainable development through cross-border e-commerce activities.
Keywords: Cross-border e-commerce, green innovation, Financial constraint, Environmental information disclosure, digital transformation
Received: 13 Jul 2025; Accepted: 23 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhang, He and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Li He, heli2022@ucass.edu.cn
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