How Green Tax Incentives Promote High-Quality Enterprise Development

The role of green tax incentives in driving the green transformation of enterprises has been widely recognized in academia. However, whether the green incentive effects of tax preferences can penetrate the black box of enterprises' production and operational decisions and reshape the logic of their resource allocation is a key factor in assessing the deeper value of such policies. Using data from the 2008–2016 National Tax Survey, this paper constructs a high-dimensional fixed-effects model to systematically examine the actual impact and underlying mechanisms of green tax incentive policies on high-quality enterprise development. The study finds that green tax incentives significantly promote enterprises' total factor productivity (TFP). The mechanism analysis shows that, unlike broadly applicable tax incentive policies, the quality-enhancing effect of green tax incentives does not rely on an investment scale effect but instead stems from the financing supplementation effect and the investment structure effect induced by the policy. Specifically, while increasing enterprises' internal funds and external subsidies, green tax incentives guide enterprises to redirect resources from conventional fixed-asset investment toward green transformation and R&D innovation, forming a development model in which quality improvement substitutes for quantitative expansion. Further analysis shows that green tax incentive policies significantly reduce enterprises' exit risk and help low-carbon enterprises achieve operating revenue growth, thereby promoting industrial-level transformation, upgrading, and structural optimization. These findings provide important empirical evidence for improving a green tax system conducive to high-quality development.