Abstract: How to stimulate enterprises’ green innovation to promote the overall green transformation and upgrading of manufacturing industry has become a key issue that needs to be solved urgently in environmental regulation policy and theoretical research. Taking the implementation of the voluntary environmental regulation policy of“green factory”certification as a quasi-natural experiment, this paper employs the multi-time point PSM-DID model to investigate the guiding effect of green innovation. The findings show that the level of green innovation of enterprises increases significantly after obtaining the“green factory”certification, which is mainly reflected in the breakthrough of innovation quality rather than quantity. The result of the mechanism analysis shows that the“green factory”certification, in conjunction with government subsidies and green credit policy tools, can effectively help enterprises obtain more government environmental subsidies, ease long-term credit costs and scale constraints, and serve as a signal to attract support from long-term institutional investors to improve the quality of green innovation. The heterogeneity analysis reveals that the quality of green innovation is moresignificantly enhanced when the“green factory”has been recognized for many times, its environmental information is more transparent and no environmental violation has been found, while the effect of the green innovation quality improvement is rather weak when the“green factory”is in heavy pollution industries. These findings suggeststhat the policy-makers should further strengthen the synergy between the certification policy and other policy tools in combination with industry attributes to enhance the incentive effect, improve the“green factory”information disclosure system to give full play to the role of signals, strengthen the pre-qualification examination and post-assessment supervision and the dynamic adjustment of the accreditation list, so as to continue to provide impetus for green innovation. The above conclusions not only provide empirical evidences for the implementation effect and function mechanism of the green certification policy, but also have great practical significance for constructing a diversified policy system, giving full play to the complementary role of government and capital markets in green transformation and upgrading, and promoting the construction of green manufacturing engineering.

Key words: “green factory”certification, green innovation, voluntary environmental regulation