Who Can Persist in Innovation? The Impact of Transition Finance on Corporate Green Value from the Perspective of Firm Lifecycle

Transition finance has emerged as a critical instrument for facilitating brown firms’ sustainable transformation, yet its heterogeneous effects across different stages of corporate development remain underexplored. This study develops a novel green value metric using a regression coefficient weighting approach and employs a difference-in-differences (DID) model to investigate how transition finance influences corporate green value through innovation persistency, based on a sample of Chinese listed brown firms from 2011 to 2022. The empirical results show that transition finance is significantly associated with an enhancement in corporate green value. Specifically, brown firms receiving transition finance exhibit a 61.6% higher green value than non-recipient firms. This effect is most pronounced during the maturity stage, where the additional green value premium for mature-stage firms is approximately 15.3% higher than for decline-stage firms. Mechanism analysis reveals that innovation persistency serves as the fundamental channel; mature-stage firms exhibit superior capacity to sustain consistent R&D investments and translate these persistent efforts into market-recognized green value premiums. These findings provide actionable insights for policymakers: transition finance frameworks should incorporate lifecycle-sensitive mechanisms rather than applying uniform standards, and incentive structures should prioritize sustained innovation commitment over one-off technological upgrades to maximize long-term sustainability outcomes.