Does the environment information announcement promote green innovation? A quasi-natural experimental evidence from the city-level of China

•To investigate the green technology selection effect of environmental information disclosure policy.•Using mediation effect model to study the transmission mechanism of environmental policy.•Using instrumental variable approach to control the endogenous problem of environmental policy.•To examine the different effects of environmental information disclosure on green technology in different cityes. Based on 230 prefecture-level city panel data from 2003 to 2019 in China, this paper uses environmental information announcement system as a quasi-natural experiment, and uses the two-stage least squares (2SLS) model with instrument variables (IVs) to test the green innovation effect of heterogeneous urban environmental information announcement. The results show that environmental information announcement can significantly stimulate green innovation, and the stimulating impact has a long duration time and heightens year by year. Under the constraints of different affluence degrees, administrative level, industrial dependence degree and the difficulty of profit acquisition, the effects of urban environmental information announcement have obvious differences. Generally, the higher the degree of urban affluence or administrative level, the more prominent the effect of green innovation of environmental information announcement is. The more dependent the city is on the polluting industry, or the easier it is to obtain profits from the polluting industry, the more difficult it is to change the direction of green innovation of environmental information announcement. Simultaneously, environmental information announcement mainly motivates the choice of green innovation by changing the difficulty of obtaining industry profits.