Does green innovation facilitate buyer firms’ attainment of trade credit from suppliers? A signalling theory perspective
ISSN: 1359-8546
Article publication date: 28 January 2025
Issue publication date: 3 February 2025
Abstract
Purpose
As a crucial supply chain financing instrument, trade credit has become increasingly important for firms to enhance financial flows in supply chains. Yet, scant research has examined how firms’ green innovation affects the attainment of trade credit from their suppliers. To bridge this gap, this study aims to draw on signalling theory to investigate the impacts of incremental green innovation (IGI) and radical green innovation (RGI) on trade credit and the contingent roles of supplier concentration and industry dynamism.
Design/methodology/approach
Using a data set of 3,302 Chinese listed manufacturing companies from 2007 to 2021, our research adopts fixed-effect regression models to test the proposed hypotheses.
Findings
The authors find that both IGI and RGI exert a positive effect on trade credit. Interestingly, supplier concentration weakens the association between RGI and trade credit, whereas it does not significantly influence the association between IGI and trade credit. Moreover, industry dynamism attenuates the relationship between IGI and trade credit, whereas it does not significantly alter the relationship between RGI and trade credit.
Originality/value
The paper extends the supply chain finance literature by applying signalling theory to uncover the effects of IGI and RGI on trade credit and the distinct contingency roles of supplier concentration and industry dynamism. It also provides supply chain managers with important implications regarding how to tailor the strategies of implementing different types of green innovation to acquire more trade credit in different situations.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers 72202193 and 72202112) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (grant number ZK1164).
Declarations of interest: The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Citation
Shao, J., Yin, L., Dai, J. and Shangguan, W. (2025), "Does green innovation facilitate buyer firms’ attainment of trade credit from suppliers? A signalling theory perspective", Supply Chain Management, Vol. 30 No. 1, pp. 144-159. https://doi.org/10.1108/SCM-06-2024-0377
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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