Abstract:  The CPC Central Committee’s decision to reach peak carbon emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060 not only concerns a community with a shared future for mankind, but also, to some extent, adjusts the developing mode of China’s economy in the future. In the process of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, low-carbon economy and digital economy are integrated, and low-carbon transformation and digital transformation complement each other. Therefore, the low-carbon city pilot policy from 2010 is taken as a “quasi-natural experiment”. Based on the micro-data of listed manufacturing enterprises from 2008 to 2020, the multi-time point DID (difference in differences) model is used to explore the influence of the policy on enterprises’ attention to digital transformation and its mechanism. The research shows that the low-carbon city pilot policy significantly improves enterprises’ attention to digital transformation; Enterprises located in pilot low-carbon cities pay 8.5% more attention to digital transformation than those not located in pilot low-carbon cities. This policy increases the attention of enterprises’ digital transformation through two mechanisms: risk at the enterprise level and enterprise output. In the heterogeneity analysis, the influence of this policy on the attention to enterprises’ digital transformation is significantly different among enterprises with different ownership and different ages. This paper provides an important empirical test for China’s listed manufacturing industry that should increase its attention to enterprises’ digital transformation in the low-carbon transformation, provides further research on the digital effect of policy effects, and lays a solid foundation for research on the cross-prospect of low-carbon and digitalization in the future.

Key words:  , low-carbon city pilot policy, digital effect, attention to digital digitalization, causal inference