Evaluating the green innovation effect driven by the synergy of green finance and environmental protection policies:Evidence from China.

Green finance and environmental protection policies serve as the "dual engines" that drive green innovation and facilitate green development. Clarifying their synergistic innovation incentive effect is essential for optimizing top-level policy design and addressing market failures in green innovation. Using a sample of A-share listed companies between 2010 and 2023, this research constructs a triple difference model to systematically evaluate the manifestation of the "dual synergy" between green finance reform pilots and environmental protection policies on enterprises' green technological innovation. The results indicate that the synergistic impact of dual policies markedly stimulates green technological innovation at the firm level. This finding holds consistently across a battery of robustness checks; mechanism tests indicate that the synergistic policies promote enterprises' green innovation through the dual channels of "strengthening environmental supervision" and "suppressing greenwashing risks"; exploratory analysis reveals that the synergistic policy impact is stronger for firms with stringent internal environmental standards, state-owned enterprises, and those operating in regions with advanced environmental governance systems. These findings underscore the necessity of continually refining the legal and regulatory frameworks for green finance and environmental protection, amplify the effectiveness of individual policies while enhancing the synergy and coupling between the two; additionally, conduct "targeted" design based on enterprise endowments and regional differences to improve policy accuracy and implementation rate, thereby injecting sustained momentum into high-quality green development.