Green innovation has become a critical measure to address the sustainable development challenges of manufacturing industries, and research has largely neglected the important role of managers as decision-makers within firms. Using a sample of China’s listed manufacturing firms from 2009 to 2019, this study explores the impact of market competition and financialization on corporate green innovation and examines the moderating effect of market competition. The main findings are as follows. First, intense market competition may inhibit corporate green innovation in the context of the Chinese market. Second, managers are willing to sacrifice firms’ long-term interests in exchange for profits in the short run. Third, market competition alleviates the negative association between financialization and corporate green innovation, indicating that the interactions between manufacturing firms may alter managers’ preferences for financial investment. In addition, our study explores heterogeneous impacts of market competition and financialization on corporate green innovation, and the empirical results are consistent with our findings in most cases. Our findings provide support for rational resource allocation in green innovation and can be used to guide manufacturing firms to achieve their goals of sustainable development.

The enterprise network is of great significance in explaining the risk-taking of individual firm. However, some unobservable networks hidden in different firms have long been neglected. Using the text data of the annual reports of China’s listed firms from 2007 to 2018, this paper adopts a textual analysis method to capture the managers’ perceptions of pressure, and build a special kind of hidden inter-firm networks, that is, the perceived competition networks of managers. In addition, this paper discusses the impact of network characteristics on corporate risk-taking behavior. Empirically, there is a positive association between competition strength and corporate risk-taking, as well as the density of perceived competition network. Furthermore, this paper explores the risk-taking behaviors of peer firms in focal firm’s perceived competition network, and finds that the improvement of peer firms’ risk-taking significantly increases the risk bearing level of focal firm, that is, the positive spillover effect of risk-taking behavior among firms in perceived competition networks. Moreover, managers’ personal traits significantly moderate the impact of network characteristics on corporate risk-taking, which is mainly reflected in younger and male managers. Our findings can enrich the literature on social interactions and corporate behaviors, and help firms to improve their understanding of perceptible peer firms.