Abstract: Corporate green transformation, which underlies ‘quality enhancement and green expansion’, constitutes a critical pathway toward comprehensive socioeconomic green transition and represents an inherent requirement for achieving high-quality development. This study examines the mechanisms and characteristics of green investor engagement in driving corporate green transformation through a capital market lens, utilizing a sample of China’s A-share listed companies from 2008 to 2022. The findings demonstrate that green investors’ entry effectively achieves a ‘dual-win’ outcome: simultaneously enhancing corporate productivity and improving environmental performance, thereby catalyzing green transformation. These results withstand robustness checks addressing indicator discrepancies, endogeneity concerns, and sample selection bias. The incentive effect is primarily due to the resource integration and green innovation effects triggered by the entry of green investors. This not only provides financial security for green transformation by stimulating increases in environmental protection expenses and green M&A activities, but also facilitates green transformation by inducing green management innovation and technological innovation within enterprises. Further investigation reveals that the entry of green investors serves the dual role of enhancing quality and expanding greenness for enterprises in the growth phase, capital-intensive and technology-intensive enterprises, and those in areas where local governments pay high attention to environmental protection. In contrast, for enterprises in the maturity and decline phases, labor-intensive enterprises, and those in regions with low local government attention to environmental protection, the entry of green investors predominantly contributes to quality improvement. Additionally, this paper verifies that China’s ‘Go Green’ financial system, green financial reform, and green credit policy can lead to a linkage effect with green investors to promote the green transformation of enterprises. These conclusions deepen the theoretical understanding of corporate green transition mechanisms while providing practical insights for activating microeconomic entities’ green development potential.

Key words: green investors, corporate green transformation, resource integration effect, green innovation effect, green financial system