Search Results (619)

With the global rise in sustainable investment concepts, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors have increasingly become important criteria influencing investment decisions. Although institutional investors are paying greater attention to corporate ESG performance, limited evidence exists regarding its impact within the Chinese A-share market. Using panel data from Chinese listed firms during the period 2010–2023, this study employs fixed-effects models with clustered standard errors as the baseline estimation method. To improve the robustness of the findings, Tobit regression, Logit regression, lagged-variable models, heterogeneity analysis, and Hausman tests are further conducted. The empirical findings indicate that the overall ESG score and the individual environmental (E), social (S), and governance (G) dimensions do not exhibit statistically significant effects on institutional ownership in the baseline fixed-effects regressions. The results suggest that ESG performance has not yet become a dominant determinant of institutional investment decisions in China’s capital market. However, the robustness tests based on Tobit and Logit models provide limited evidence that ESG performance may still influence institutional investor behavior under alternative empirical specifications. Furthermore, the heterogeneity analysis reveals that the relationship between ESG dimensions and institutional ownership differs across environmentally related and non-environmentally related firms, although the effects are generally weak and statistically limited. The study contributes to the ESG and institutional investment literature in three important ways. First, it provides updated evidence from the Chinese A-share market over the 2010–2023 period, reflecting the evolving stage of ESG development in emerging economies. Second, it comparatively examines the differentiated roles of environmental, social, and governance dimensions rather than relying solely on aggregated ESG indicators. Third, it highlights the limited and transitional nature of ESG integration among institutional investors in China, where traditional financial indicators continue to play a more important role in investment decisions. The findings provide important implications for policymakers, listed firms, and institutional investors seeking to promote sustainable finance development and improve the effectiveness of ESG disclosure practices in emerging markets. Full article

Whether information consumption guides firms back to their core businesses or instead exacerbates corporate financialization remains empirically underexplored. We use panel data of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2009 to 2024. We take China’s Information Consumption Pilot policy as a quasi-natural experiment and employ a staggered difference-in-differences approach to examine the impact of information consumption on corporate financialization. The findings show that information consumption significantly promotes corporate financialization, with the precautionary motive driving financialization more strongly than the profit-seeking motive. Mechanism tests reveal that information consumption drives corporate financialization by easing financing constraints and improving investment efficiency, while internal corporate governance and external economic policy uncertainty play significant moderating roles. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the exacerbating effect of information consumption on corporate financialization is more pronounced in non-state-owned enterprises, small-scale firms, non-high-tech industries, and regions with a low level of financial development. Further analysis shows that information consumption not only exacerbates excessive corporate financialization but also triggers peer effects in financialization. Moreover, the financialization induced by information consumption suppresses long-term corporate performance growth. These findings uncover the micro-mechanisms through which information consumption reshapes corporate capital allocation decisions, offering practical implications for refining information consumption policies and channeling financial resources back to the real economy. Full article

Digital infrastructure may improve firm productivity, yet its economic value depends on whether firms can absorb external connectivity and embed it in production, management, and investment decisions. Using the staggered implementation of the “Broadband China” pilot policy as a quasi-natural experiment, this study examines the effect of city-level broadband infrastructure on the revenue-based labor productivity of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2009 to 2023. A multi-period difference-in-differences model shows that the pilot policy is associated with an increase in revenue per employee. The baseline estimate implies an economically meaningful increase of approximately 4.1%, and the result remains robust to alternative productivity measures, sample restrictions, stricter fixed effects, placebo tests, PSM-DID, and IPW-DID. CSDID estimates are positive but not statistically significant at conventional levels and are therefore interpreted as directionally consistent rather than independently confirmatory. Evidence based on total factor productivity, management expense intensity, and investment adjustment is consistent with production efficiency, management coordination, and organizational adjustment channels. Heterogeneity tests show stronger effects among non-state-owned, eastern region, and non-manufacturing firms. The findings suggest that broadband infrastructure generates productivity benefits when firms have the organizational absorptive capacity to convert external digital connectivity into internal operational efficiency. Full article

Fulfilling corporate ESG responsibilities enhances a firm’s sustainable development capabilities but also comes at an economic cost. This study investigates whether firms should invest heavily in ESG or maintain moderate ESG practices to balance cost efficiency and resilience. Using a sample of A-share listed companies in China from 2012 to 2024, we employ OLS regression models to explore the impact of ESG responsibility fulfillment on cost stickiness and the factors that influence this relationship. The study finds that (1) there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between corporate ESG responsibility fulfillment and cost stickiness; (2) the turning point lies between the B and CCC Huazheng ESG rating levels. Below this level, ESG responsibility fulfillment reduces cost stickiness, while above it, excessive ESG fulfillment increases cost stickiness; (3) environmental sensitivity, managerial overconfidence, and state ownership amplify this non-linear effect, making the reduction or increase in cost stickiness more pronounced. This paper deepens the understanding of the drivers of cost stickiness from the perspective of ESG responsibility fulfillment, offering new insights for future research on cost behavior and providing valuable guidance for firms seeking to optimize cost management through ESG strategies. Full article

As the automotive industry undergoes a green transformation, digital upgrading, and increasingly intensive supply chain collaboration, the supply chain finance credit risks faced by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the sector exhibit characteristics such as multi-source interaction, nonlinear transmission, and class imbalance. This study uses 210 SMEs in China’s A-share automotive sector from 2020 to 2024 and constructs a credit risk evaluation system covering 56 indicators across the macro environment, financing enterprises, supply chain characteristics, and core enterprise credit support. Methodologically, DE-LightGBM is employed for feature selection to reduce redundancy and noise, while TabPFGen is introduced to generate synthetic risk-class samples. Business logic constraints and a Nearest Neighbor Distance Ratio filtering mechanism are further applied to improve the plausibility and fidelity of generated samples. Empirical results show that the TabPFN model achieves superior predictive performance after feature selection and data augmentation, and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test confirms the effectiveness and stability of sample augmentation. In addition, the ablation experiment demonstrates that green-related features provide significant incremental predictive value for supply chain finance credit risk identification. The proposed framework provides a useful reference for SME credit assessment, risk early warning, and green financial resource allocation in the automotive industry. Full article

Against the backdrop of China’s innovation-driven development strategy, innovation diffusion is a key stage through which firm-level innovation outcomes generate broader economic value. However, this process is often constrained by financing pressure, information asymmetry, and uncertainty in external evaluation. This study examines whether and how bank–firm common ownership, as an ownership-based financial linkage between banks and firms, affects corporate innovation diffusion. Using data on Chinese A-share non-financial listed companies from 2010 to 2023, this paper finds that bank–firm common ownership significantly promotes corporate innovation diffusion. The results remain robust after alternative variable measurements, a higher identification threshold for bank–firm common ownership, lagged explanatory variables, instrumental-variable estimation and propensity score matching. Further mechanism tests show that bank–firm common ownership promotes innovation diffusion mainly through two risk-related channels: liquidity-risk buffering and information-risk reduction. First, it improves firms’ access to commercial credit financing, thereby strengthening their liquidity-risk buffering capacity and helping them withstand financing pressure during the innovation diffusion process. Second, it improves firms’ information disclosure, thereby reducing information asymmetry and external evaluation uncertainty surrounding innovation activities. Further analysis shows that the positive effect of bank–firm common ownership on innovation diffusion is more pronounced among state-owned enterprises and firms with stronger market positions. This study enriches the literature on financial linkages and corporate innovation diffusion, and provides evidence on how bank–firm ownership ties can support innovation diffusion through liquidity-risk buffering and information-risk reduction. Full article

Against the backdrop of the dual-carbon goals and the Digital China initiative, the urgent need for enterprises to pursue green innovation and transformation is evident. Supply chain digitalization serves as a critical enabler for enterprises to achieve a low-carbon industrial transformation and high-quality development through the effective coordination of data resources across the entire chain. This study examines A-share listed companies from 2012 to 2023, leveraging the 2018 Supply Chain Innovation and Application Pilot Policy to construct a quasi-natural experiment. Employing a difference-in-differences approach with multiple mediation effects, it investigates the impact of supply chain digitalization on corporate green innovation and its transmission mechanisms. Findings reveal that supply chain digitalization significantly enhances corporate green innovation levels, with this effect being more pronounced in substantive innovation, western regions, and firms with high customer concentration. Mechanism tests reveal that supply chain digitalization promotes green innovation not only through independent pathways of enhancing information transparency and improving ESG performance but also via a chained mediation effect: “supply chain digitalization → information transparency → ESG performance → green innovation”. This study enriches theoretical research on the relationship between supply chain digitalization and green innovation from the dual perspectives of information and governance, offering insights for government initiatives to advance data sharing, implement differentiated policies, and establish green governance systems. Full article

Green bonds have become an important financial instrument for supporting environmental investment and industrial transformation. This paper examines short-term profitability dynamics around first green bond issuance among heavy-polluting firms listed on China’s A-share market. Using a staggered-adoption framework based on the group-time average treatment effect estimator of Callaway and Sant’Anna we compare issuing firms after issuance with never-issuing and not-yet-issuing firms while controlling for firm characteristics, firm fixed effects, and year fixed effects. The estimates show that issuing firms experience an average post-issuance ROE decline of approximately 4.9 percentage points during the four years following issuance. Given that the average ROE in the sample is 0.0702, this estimate is economically substantial. Because green bond issuance is a voluntary corporate financing decision rather than an externally assigned policy shock, the estimates are interpreted as treatment-on-the-treated effects under the assumptions of no anticipation, overlap, and conditional parallel trends. Additional diagnostics and a DuPont-style mechanism analysis suggest that the post-issuance ROE decline is mainly associated with lower net profit margins and, to a lesser extent, lower asset turnover. Heterogeneity analyses indicate that the post-issuance profitability pressure varies across ownership types, regions, and industries. Full article

Based on panel data of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2011 to 2023 (29,868 firm-year observations in total), this paper explores the environmental spillover relationship between regional digital financial inclusion (a proxy for the external digital financial ecosystem) and corporate financial investment efficiency. To identify causal effects, we adopt firm fixed effects and three strategies to mitigate endogeneity, namely, interactive fixed effects, lagged terms of regional digital financial inclusion, and instrumental variable estimation. The results suggest that regional digital financial inclusion, when interpreted as an environmental spillover from the external digital financial ecosystem, is associated with curbed inefficient financial investment and thus with improved investment efficiency. This effect operates through three channels: easing financing constraints, improving managerial sentiment, and accelerating digital transformation. Moreover, the positive effect is statistically significant and concentrates among non-state-owned enterprises, firms in eastern China, and sectors with limited traditional financial access (e.g., manufacturing and low-contact industries). Different from prior studies focusing on real investment efficiency, this paper enriches the literature on regional digital financial inclusion from an environmental spillover perspective. It also offers policy implications for fostering sustainable economic growth, strengthening the resilience of the real economy, and improving capital allocation efficiency. Full article

Global climate governance is undergoing a rapid transformation, and energy systems are increasingly shifting toward low-carbon development. Against this background, improving manufacturing firms’ green total factor productivity (MFGTFP) is essential for achieving sustainable industrial development. China has introduced two major policy instruments: new energy demonstration cities (NEDCs) and low-carbon city pilots (LCCPs). NEDCs focus on optimizing the energy supply structure, whereas LCCPs seek to reduce carbon emissions through demand-side regulatory constraints. This study treated the joint implementation of NEDCs and LCCPs as a quasi-natural experiment and employed panel data from Chinese A-share listed manufacturing firms from 2007 to 2024. Using a multi-period difference-in-differences model and mechanism tests, we examined the effect of the joint implementation of these policies on MFGTFP. The empirical results show that the joint implementation of NEDCs and LCCPs significantly improves MFGTFP. This effect is more pronounced when NEDCs are introduced prior to LCCPs, particularly in cities with a higher government ecological governance capacity (GEGC) and in regions characterized by a lower carbon emission intensity (CEI). Mechanism analysis revealed that the joint effects of NEDCs and LCCPs operate through supply-side innovation and partially through demand-side cost-pressure channels. On the supply side, NEDCs promote green innovation (GI), thereby enhancing firms’ supply innovation. On the demand side, the evidence mainly reflects financing constraint (FC) alleviation rather than a positive capacity utilization (CU) channel. Together, these findings suggest that improvements in MFGTFP are driven by supply-side innovation incentives and partially by demand-side cost-pressure effects through FC alleviation. These findings provide firm-level evidence on how the joint implementation of energy and carbon policies promotes green productivity improvement. Full article

In the strategic context of China’s efforts to promote agricultural power and modernization, the key to achieving sustainable development for agricultural enterprises lies in fostering breakthrough innovations and enhancing their market competitiveness. This paper uses Chinese agricultural enterprises listed on the A-share market from 2009 to 2024 as its research sample. From the perspective of breakthrough innovation in agriculture-related enterprises, it examines the association between agricultural new quality productivity and the sustainable development of agricultural enterprises. The regression results show that, first, agricultural new quality productivity is positively associated with breakthrough innovation in agricultural enterprises. After a series of robustness tests, these findings remain valid. Second, the bootstrap mediation results indicate that this relationship operates mainly through government policy orientation and enterprise knowledge creation capacity, while the indirect effects of government resource support and independent R&D capacity are weaker and not statistically robust. Furthermore, a heterogeneity test revealed that agricultural new quality productivity has a more pronounced positive association with breakthrough innovation in regions with strong intellectual property protection and high environmental regulations, as well as in samples where corporate executives demonstrate greater environmental awareness and companies achieve higher overall ESG scores. Finally, further analysis shows that as the level of corporate green transformation increases, the enabling effect of agricultural new quality productivity on breakthrough innovation in agricultural enterprises becomes more pronounced, providing evidence on how ANQP may support the sustainable development of agricultural enterprises. Full article

As a major policy initiative, China’s Industry–Finance Cooperation (IFC) Pilot Program aims to address the enduring difficulties enterprises face in securing affordable financing. Despite its intent, the policy’s actual efficacy in alleviating corporate financing constraints remains ambiguous. Based on panel data of Chinese A-share listed firms (2011–2023, 19,742 observations), this paper adopts a difference-in-differences (DID) estimator to investigate the effect of China’s IFC Pilot Policy on corporate financing constraints. The results demonstrate that the IFC Pilot Policy significantly alleviates such constraints. Further mechanism and heterogeneity analyses reveal that it operates primarily by reducing earning management, lowering financing costs, and mitigating business risks. This study contributes to the field by establishing the finance-easing effect and risk management mechanism of industry–finance cooperation, offering valuable guidance for policymakers seeking to refine and optimize similar supply-side financial reform measures. Full article

The tension between corporate growth and sustainability is a common governance dilemma faced by transitional economies in their green development. This study incorporates corporate ESG performance and its potential influencing factors into the analysis framework and constructs a theoretical model to capture the relationship between China’s National Demonstration Base policy for Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation (MEI) and corporate ESG performance, based on the framework that integrates resource enablement, reputation accumulation and information governance. Leveraging the quasi-natural experiment provided by China’s National Demonstration Program for Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation (MEI), this study systematically evaluates the impact of China’s demonstration policy on corporate ESG performance, drawing on data from A-share listed companies spanning 2010 to 2024. The study finds that the demonstration policy significantly improves enterprise ESG performance, which remains robust after a series of robustness tests. The mechanism test reveals that the policy promotes firms’ green technology innovation by lowering innovation costs, facilitates the accumulation of social reputational capital by incentivizing charitable donations, and compels improvements in information disclosure quality by strengthening market-oriented oversight. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the policy effects are more prominent among heavy polluting industries, large-scale enterprises and firms at the mature stage. Moreover, industry competition intensity and digital transformation have a positive moderating effect on the policy effects. This paper enriches the theoretical dialogue between institutional innovation policy and enterprise sustainable development, providing empirical evidence for the development of a collaborative ESG governance mechanism characterized by an active government and an efficient market. Full article

As global manufacturing pursues green and low-carbon transitions, servitization offers a critical pathway for firms to advance sustainability goals. Yet the “servitization paradox” persists, dampening firms’ willingness and capacity to adopt service-oriented strategies, while existing research offers limited explanations for why some transformations succeed and others fail. Drawing on embeddedness theory, this study applies fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to a sample of 110 A-share listed servitization demonstration manufacturers in China (2015–2022). It systematically investigates how configurations of cognitive, relational, and environmental embeddedness jointly drive servitization outcomes. The findings reveal the following. (1) The service-oriented transformation of manufacturing enterprises is the result of the synergistic interaction of multiple antecedent conditions, with relational embeddedness playing a core driving role in SSP and strategic flexibility playing a core driving role in SSC. (2) There are multiple equivalent pathways for the service-oriented transformation of manufacturing enterprises; the three configuration pathways for high SSP are innovation-driven gap filling–flexible supply chain collaboration, competition-led–product–customer coupling, and institutional backstop–relationship embedded compensation. The three pathways for high SSC are: low supply dependency–autonomous flexibility, institutional guidance–flexible compensation, and innovative customer lock-in–loose market empowerment. This study enhances the understanding of service transformation in manufacturing enterprises and provides theoretical guidance and decision-making references for enterprises to select service transformation pathways tailored to their specific circumstances. Full article

Achieving net-zero emissions requires balancing decarbonization with sustained enterprise development. Using panel data on China’s A-share listed firms from 2011 to 2023, this study examines whether regional carbon emission trading rights (CETR) pilots promote enterprise upgrading, proxied by the New Quality Productive Forces (NQPF) index. A staggered multi-period difference-in-differences framework shows that the CETR policy significantly increases enterprise NQPF (coefficient 0.059, p < 0.05). This finding remains robust after parallel trend tests, placebo simulations, propensity score matching, controlling for overlapping environmental policies, and using alternative outcome measures. Channel analyses indicate that CETR affects NQPF through two pathways: easing financing constraints (coefficient −0.019, p < 0.01) and accelerating digital transformation (coefficient 0.102, p < 0.01). The positive policy effect is stronger among non-state-owned enterprises and among firms whose senior managers lack financial backgrounds or do not hold concurrent positions in shareholder units. These results demonstrate that carbon trading drives systemic enterprise upgrading via resource and technology channels, with important heterogeneity across ownership and governance structures. Full article