Sustainable Development Agenda Pilot Zones Policy, Entrepreneurial Green Attention and Corporate Green Development

Sustainable development represents a fundamental pathway for advancing high-quality economic and social transformation. Taking China’s Sustainable Development Agenda Pilot Zones Policy as a quasi-natural experiment and drawing on data from A-share listed firms from 2013 to 2022, this study constructs a difference-in-differences model to systematically assess the policy’s impact on corporate green development and the underlying mechanisms. The empirical results indicate that the policy significantly improves corporate green development and that entrepreneurial green attention exerts a significant positive moderating effect. The mechanism analysis shows that improvements in the digital–real integration, the strengthening of regional green innovation capability, and increases in media attention constitute the primary channels through which the policy takes effect. The heterogeneity analysis further reveals that the policy impact is more pronounced among non-state-owned enterprises, firms in non-heavily polluting industries, regions oriented toward modern urban development, and cities with higher levels of governmental environmental concern. Additional analyses suggest that, while fostering green development, the policy is also associated with a greater tendency toward inflation in green invention patents and a decline in the quality of environmental information disclosure. These findings deepen the understanding of the micro-level effects of differentiated environmental regulation and provide empirical evidence for improving the green governance system and promoting high-quality development in China.