Environmental information disclosure and green technology innovation: Empirical evidence from China

•We explore the effect of environmental information disclosure on green technology innovation.•We use 289 prefecture level cities in China that allows us to open up new empirical evidence of the effects on green technology innovation.•We investigate the influence mechanism of pollution information transparency index (PITI) on green technology innovation.•The green innovation environment, pollution charges and industrial structure have been identified as mediator variables.•The foreign investment, government education and technology expenditure in terms of capital investment have been testified as moderator variables. Environmental information disclosure is a dominant feature of good ecological environment construction, which reflects the emergence of social supervision. In this paper, we employ the Difference in Difference (DID) method, for 289 prefecture level cities in China that allows us to open up new empirical evidence of the effects on green technology innovation. The results indicate that disclosure of environmental information is more likely to promote green technologies, which is measured by green patent application. As substitute indicators, green patent of utility model and invention patent further confirm the result by robust test. To address the potential regional heterogeneity, we find eastern China might be the place where the above three green patent application have their most pronounced effects. Pollution Information Transparency Index (PITI) was designed to spur innovation, which also has been proved in our paper. Furthermore, green innovation environment, pollution charges and industrial structure have been identified as mediator variables, and foreign investment, government education and technology expenditure in terms of capital investment have been testified as moderator variables.