The Impact of Environmental Innovations on Corporate Financial Performance: Examining the Influential Factors

Despite being extremely relevant and widely discussed, the question of how environmental innovations affect firms’ financial performance remains controversial. The available literature on the topic shows ambivalent results. While some studies provide empirical evidence for the positive impact of green innovations on financial performance, others reveal a negligible or negative relationship between green innovations and financial performance. We performed a meta-analysis of the 29 selected studies covering the period from 1999 to 2017. It was found that there are no sufficient grounds to consider that the location of a firm substantially affects the possibility of the positive impact of environmental innovations on financial performance. Environmental innovations positively affect firms’ financial performance with the probability p ≈ (0.7–0.9). Usage of the qualitative research methods tends to provide a more positive assessment of the impact of environmental innovation on financial performance than quantitative methods.