Abstract:     Green innovation is the key to achieving the win-win goal of fostering economic development and reducing environmental pollution. This paper innovatively took the "green innovation quantity" and "green innovation quality" as different representations of the green innovation. On this basis, we took China′s Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share heavy polluting listed companies as a sample, and studied the impact of environmental information disclosure on firms′ green innovation by using the mediating effect model and moderating effect model. The results showed that: (1) Environmental information disclosure forces the listed companies to increase the number of green innovations, but reduces the quality of green innovation. This conclusion is still valid after a series of robustness tests. (2) Environmental information disclosure exacerbates short-termism, which crowds out high-quality green innovations. (3) Improving the management ability and increasing the shareholding ratio of long-term institutional investors can correct the green innovation formalism of enterprises. Our results will not only contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the logical relationship between environmental information disclosure and green innovation, but also provide practical evidence for further optimization of environmental governance and promotion of enterprises′ core competitive capability.

Key words: environmental information disclosure, innovation quality, innovation quantity, green innovation