Family business financialization and green innovation in China from 2008 to 2023

Driven by profit, the excessive enthusiasm of family enterprises for financial asset investment is bound to affect sustainable green innovation investment. In order to curb the excessive expansion of family business financialization and guide finance to return to serving the essence of the real economy, we analyzed the impact of family business financialization on green innovation from the perspective of family operations. In this study, we selected 4,108 family enterprises in China from 2008 to 2023 to establish OLS models and structural equation models (SEM) comprehensively, obtaining main conclusions: The financialization of family businesses suppressed green innovation by decreasing the level of risk-taking. Family control weakened the negative relationship between risk-taking and green innovation, while family management strengthened this relationship. When the generation of controllers and managers were one, the moderating effect of family control on risk-taking and green innovation was more significant. Therefore, this paper proposes suggestions from four aspects: moderately allocating family members, enhancing the risk management level of family businesses, consolidating family control rights, and improving the inheritability of social capital, in order to ultimately achieve stable intergenerational inheritance and sustainable operation of family businesses.