The progression of the social credit system is crucial for fostering enterprise innovation and elevating the quality of economic development. Based on the quasi-natural experiment of establishing demonstration cities for the social credit system, this study delves into whether the construction of a social credit system can indeed foster enterprise innovation. Our findings indicate that the establishment of demonstration cities for social credit system promotes enterprise innovation and improves the quality of innovation. Furthermore, mechanism test shows that it alleviates financing constraints faced by enterprises, leading to an increase in the scale and maturity of corporate loans, ultimately fostering corporate innovation. Further analysis of heterogeneity highlights that this positive impact is particularly evident in non-state-owned enterprises and those facing severe financing constraints. These findings present insights that the pivotal role of informal institutions, such as the social credit system, in facilitating the upgrading of industrial structures and augmenting the quality of economic development.

Based on the matching data of China’s industrial enterprise database and enterprise patent database, this study investigates the effect and mechanism of government subsidy policy on the innovation performance of Chinese enterprises using the panel data matching and multi-period difference-in-difference model. Results show that the incentive effect of government subsidy policy on enterprises’ innovation performance is dominant, thus improving the innovation performance of Chinese manufacturing enterprises. However, the promotion effect on lowquality innovation is greater than that on high-quality innovation. Moreover, the government subsidy policy affects the innovation performance of enterprises by stimulating enterprises to increase their R&D investment, increasing the spending on rent-seeking and taking on more social responsibility. The government subsidy policy significantly affects the innovation performance of non-state-owned enterprises, small and medium-sized enterprises, and technology-intensive industries. The impact of government subsidizing policies varies regionally. The policy effect on enterprise innovation performance is significant in the eastern and central regions but not in the western and northeast regions.

In the process of green transformation of China's economy, it is of great practical significance to study the impact of green finance in supporting the development of the real economy, especially the impact of green credit on enterprise innovation, in order to promote the green transformation of enterprises, industrial structure upgrading and sustainable economic development. This paper takes green credit as a perspective and introduces it into the analytical framework of the impact of environmental regulation on corporate green innovation, through theoretical mechanism analysis and empirical testing, in order to reveal the impact and mechanism of green credit on corporate green innovation. It is found that green credit can effectively promote green innovation in heavy polluting enterprises, and it is mainly reflected in the increase of green utility model patent applications with a low degree of inventiveness. The promotion effect of green credit on green innovation is more obvious in regions with lower levels of economic development. Further mechanism analysis shows that green credit policy promotes green innovation of heavy polluting enterprises mainly through the incentive effect brought by changing financing environment and the pressure effect brought by increasing market competition. The findings of this paper can provide references for policy-making departments, banks and enterprises.

As a product of the integration of traditional finance and Internet technology, digital finance plays an important role in micro enterprise innovation and even macroeconomic development. Based on the data of China's A-share listed companies from 2011 to 2018, this paper explores the effect of the development of digital finance on enterprise innovation. The research finds that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between the development of digital finance and enterprise innovation. Further research shows that this inverted U-shaped impact of digital finance is stronger on strategic innovation of enterprises, suggesting that enterprises pay more attention to the "quantity" rather than "quality" of innovation. Finally, the inflection point of the inverted U-shaped relationship is brought forward by the industry competition and media pressure. This paper not only enriches the research on the relationship between digital finance and enterprise innovation, but also provides a theoretical basis for the development of digital finance and the improvement of financial regulatory framework.