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The implementation of market-based climate policies represented by the emission trading system (ETS) is an important path for countries to participate in global climate governance and achieve the goals of carbon emission peaking and carbon neutrality. Whether the covered firms can improve financial performance through bearing responsibility for cutting emissions, a "win-win" of environmental and economic achievement, is an important way to evaluate the effectiveness of ETS. Based on the Chinese A-share listed firms in industrial sector during the period of 2010–2017, this paper employs PSM-DID method to investigate the impact of China's pilot ETS on financial performance of the covered firms. The results show that the covered firm's financial performance is improved by the implementation of pilot ETS, which can increase firm's ROA by 0.01 unit. Specifically, the pilot ETS can significantly improve the financial performance of non-state-owned firms, without affecting state-owned firms. Similarly, the financial performance improvement is more significant for firms in non-energy industries. Furthermore, the pilot ETS can motivate the covered firms to gain financial profit through cutting carbon emission as a mediation path, and the mediation effect size of carbon emission intensity is 0.001. Besides, firm's innovation ability weakens this mediation path, and the well-developed institutions in pilot area, proxied by high degree of marketization, only weaken the first part of the path, namely, carbon emission reduction led by ETS. • ETS achieves a win-win of carbon emission reduction and financial performance improvement. • The improvements by ETS are heterogeneous in ownership and industry. • Firm's carbon emission intensity plays a mediation role. • Firms can gain more benefit under the ETS regulation if the market monopoly is strong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]