Green common institutional ownership and energy-saving technological innovation: evidence from China

Under the goal of high-quality development, investigating the impact of green common institutional ownership on energy-saving technological innovation to promote enterprises’ green transformation is highly practical. Using data on China’s A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2024 and the bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) model, we analyse the impact of green common institutional ownership on enterprises’ energy-saving technological innovation. The study reveals that green common institutional ownership significantly promotes enterprises’ energy-saving technological innovation. Mechanism analysis reveals that green common institutional ownership promotes enterprises to carry out energy-saving technological innovation by improving the innovation efficiency of human and financial resources. Further analysis reveals that the network power and investment horizon of common institutional ownership can strengthen the promoting effect of green common institutional ownership on enterprises’ energy-saving technological innovation. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the promotion effect of green common institutional ownership is more obvious among private enterprises and enterprises with higher levels of digitalization and lower financing constraints. This study expands the research on corporate governance and innovation decision-making from the perspective of green common institutional ownership and provides a beneficial reference for achieving green development.