Abstract: Green innovation brings about the double returns for economy and environment,improving green innovation efficiency is an important approach to realize the balanced development of resources,economy and environment. By building a green innovation efficiency stochastic frontier analysis model and making use of China's provincial data from 2011 to 2015,this paper evaluates and compares the green innovation efficiencies of China's 30 provinces,and empirically exams the effects of different types of institutions. The results show that:first,during 2011 to 2015,the green innovation efficiencies of all provinces are about 0.52 on average,revealing the characteristics of going down from eastern,middle to western regions on the whole; as for the patterns of change,most of the provinces experience improvements in the green innovation efficiency,and the regional differences are gradually narrowing down. Second,the green innovation efficiency is positively correlated to all types of institutions; among the institutions,the impacts of the intellectual property institution,financial institution,environmental institution and fiscal institution are significant while the impact of the basic law institution is not significant. Besides,input prices and market structure also show important impacts.