Does executives' prior experience matter for corporate green innovation? Evidence from China

This paper explores whether executives' experience related to green innovation developed in their former firms affect green innovation performance of their successor firms when they change jobs between different firms. By tracking executives' movement across Chinese listed firms, we find a significantly positive association between the green innovation performance of the former and the successor firm for the same executive, which supports the behavioral consistency theory. This pattern is more pronounced when the successor firm has stronger environmental attention and lower top management team age heterogeneity. Overall, our findings corroborate the importance of executives' prior experience in corporate green innovation.