Search Results (15)

Sustainable development has become the universal consensus among nations worldwide, with society increasingly recognizing the importance of fulfilling ESG responsibilities. This recognition has begun to influence companies’ supplier evaluation and selection behaviors. Meanwhile, integrating AI and IoT technologies has brought about new possibilities for enhancing the intelligence of supply chain management. Firstly, the concept of AIoT suppliers was defined, and evaluation and selection criteria were discussed and proposed. Secondly, the impact of ESG factors on the evaluation criteria of AIoT suppliers was explored, while the value of AIoT technology empowerment from an ESG perspective was analyzed. According to a case study of new energy vehicle supply chain management, the application of AIoT technology can assist companies in improving their ESG management capabilities and performance across multiple dimensions, thereby contributing to the long-term sustainable development of companies. Full article

Grounded in institutional theory, this study uses a sample of A-share listed companies from 2009 to 2023 to empirically examine the effects of coercive, mimetic, and normative pressures on corporate ESG responsibility. The results indicate that coercive and mimetic pressures significantly promote ESG responsibility fulfilment, while normative pressures have a negative impact. This research expands the application of institutional theory to ESG practices, offering valuable insights for policymakers, regulators, and corporate managers. By strengthening supervision, promoting industry best practices, and fostering social responsibility awareness, corporate ESG fulfilment can be further advanced, driving sustainable development. Full article

In the context of increasingly severe global climate change, both companies and investors are placing greater emphasis on investment philosophies centered around environmental protection, social responsibility, and corporate governance (ESG). This paper, based on data from 847 Chinese A-share listed companies over the period 2007–2022, employs a two-way fixed effects model to investigate the relationship between ESG controversies and firm investment efficiency. The results indicate that ESG controversies significantly reduce overall firm investment efficiency. Further analysis reveals that ESG controversies affect investment efficiency by exacerbating agency costs and reducing audit quality. Meanwhile, financing constraints and robust internal control quality mitigate these negative effects. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the impact is more pronounced for firms with higher pollution levels, non-state-owned enterprises, those with higher analyst coverage, and firms with lower levels of digitalization. The findings have significant implications for encouraging companies to fulfill their social responsibilities and promote high-quality economic development. Full article

This study examines the mutual relationships among ESG performance, total factor productivity (TFP), and energy efficiency (EE) in a sample of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2010 to 2022. This study shows that ESG has a significant promotional effect on TFP. Reducing financing constraints and inefficient investment are among the mediating mechanisms, and the latter plays a greater role. Heterogeneity analyses suggest that state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and heavy-polluting enterprises (HPEs) should be consistently committed to ESG responsibility fulfillment. Formal environmental regulation (FER) can be complementary to ESG, but informal environmental regulation (IER) has the opposite effect. TFP was instead suppressed by the triple combined effect of ESG with these two. The results of the threshold effects of ESG and EE indicate that the positive impact on EE becomes more pronounced as ESG performance improves. However, ESG performance varies across subdimensions. As green technology research and development efficiency (GRDE) and green technology transformation efficiency (GTTE) improve, stronger ESG promotes EE. This threshold effect also exhibits heterogeneity with respect to the ownership structure. Moreover, there is bidirectional causality between EE and TFP, and EE has a stronger positive effect on TFP. These findings reveal the optimal paths and potential risks for moving toward sustainability for firms. Full article

Climate risk’s effects on society and economic development are becoming more pronounced, and enterprises have to seize the opportunity for green transformation. Based on public company data from 2011 to 2022, this study explores the causal relationship between climate risk exposure (CRE) and ESG performance by using a two-way fixed effect mode. The results indicate that CRE significantly enhances firms’ ESG performance, which makes improvements in environmental practices. The impact of the promotion is particularly pronounced in state-owned and low-polluting businesses. In addition, it can improve ESG through potential impact channels, such as employing environmental executives, improving environmental protection, and boosting green innovation. Meanwhile, the digital level and financing constraints of enterprises play an effective moderating role. Further discussion shows that the increase in CRE has prompted firms to fulfill environmental responsibilities and reduce carbon emissions. This study provides new quantitative evidence on how firms respond to climate risk, expanding the existing research on ESG performance. It further examines the specific impact path of climate risk on companies’ and green transformation and provides more firm-level insights for policymakers to address climate change. These results enrich the theoretical system of climate risk management and help enterprises strengthen awareness of climate risk to cope with sustainable development. Full article

In the context of addressing climate change, the uncertainty of climate policies has intensified the environmental and regulatory risks faced by enterprises, forcing them to adjust their strategies for fulfilling ESG responsibilities in pursuit of sustainable development. This paper uses panel data from listed non-financial enterprises on China’s Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share markets from 2011 to 2022, employing a fixed-effects panel model to examine the impact of climate policy uncertainty on corporate ESG performance. The findings indicate that climate policy uncertainty significantly hampers the ESG performance of enterprises. The mechanism analysis reveals that climate policy uncertainty negatively affects ESG performance by deepening corporate financing constraints and increasing short-term financial performance. The heterogeneity analysis shows that in terms of ownership structure, the negative impact of climate policy uncertainty on the ESG performance of state-owned enterprises is relatively weaker. In terms of industry heterogeneity, climate policy uncertainty suppresses the ESG performance of enterprises in technology-intensive industries. From a regional perspective, climate policy uncertainty has a stronger inhibitory effect on the ESG performance of enterprises in eastern China. This study provides valuable insights for both national climate policy formulation and corporate efforts to enhance ESG performance. Full article

The National Civilized City Program is an important governance championship for cities in China. Taking the National Civilized City Program as a quasi-natural experiment, based on the data of A-share listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen from 2009 to 2021, the multi-period double-difference method is used to investigate the impact, mechanism of action and heterogeneity of the National Civilized City Program on corporate ESG performance. It is found that the National Civilized City Program can significantly enhance corporate ESG performance, and this conclusion still holds after a series of robustness tests. The National Civilized City Program improves corporate ESG performance through two channels: strengthening environmental regulation and promoting the fulfillment of corporate responsibility towards employees. There is significant heterogeneity in terms of geography, firm ownership and pollution attributes in the impact of the National Civilized City Program on firms’ ESG performance. Full article

Against the backdrop of economic transformation and sustainable development, this paper utilizes listed companies from the Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share markets from 2009 to 2021 as research samples, measures corporate leverage manipulation levels using the XLT-LEVM method, and employs a panel fixed effects model to empirically examine the impact of corporate ESG responsibility fulfillment on leverage manipulation behaviors and its underlying mechanisms. The results show that the performance of ESG responsibility can inhibit the leverage manipulation behavior of enterprises, and this effect is more obvious in enterprises with low analyst attention and excessive debt. Mechanism tests reveal that the fulfillment of ESG responsibilities by corporations exerts both reputational and informational effects, which, by mitigating financing constraints and enhancing information transparency, subsequently curtail corporate leverage manipulation. The analysis of economic consequences demonstrates that the inhibitory effect of ESG responsibility fulfillment on corporate leverage manipulation contributes to reducing the risk of corporate debt default. The research conclusions of this paper hold instructive significance for the positive governance role of ESG performance. Consequently, governments and regulatory bodies should guide and support enterprises in assuming ESG responsibilities, and corporations should increase their investments in ESG and enhance their ESG performance. Full article

In this study, we leverage a comprehensive dataset of over 3.8 million bid entries from institutional investors participating in China’s capital market to investigate the determinants of heterogeneous bidding behavior among these investors and the subsequent economic outcomes. We evaluate the sustainability of initial public offering (IPO) performance through three interrelated metrics: post-IPO stock price performance, financial accounting performance, and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance. Our analysis reveals a pronounced positive association between the quality of firms’ pre-IPO and the recent reforms to the bookbuilding mechanism in China’s capital market, as well as the level of diversity in institutional investors’ bidding opinions. After accounting for these factors, we focus on the nexus between the diversity of bidding opinions and the sustainability of IPO performance. The empirical evidence indicates that a higher degree of diversity in bidding opinions is inversely related to firms’ post-IPO stock price performance, financial accounting performance, and ESG performance. Further mechanism tests suggest that this diversity leads to a depletion of medium- to long-term share price performance by intensifying market sentiment; impedes the enhancement of financial accounting performance by reducing the capital raised during the IPO; and negatively impacts ESG performance by constraining the firm’s ability to fulfill its corporate social responsibilities. These findings challenge the assumption that diversity of opinion is always beneficial. The insights gained from this research have significant implications for the sustainable growth strategies of listed companies in emerging markets. Full article

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a management strategy that simultaneously pursues societal and company sustainable development. Additionally, CSR is becoming a key strategy to secure competitiveness and sustainability by improving a company’s reputation and creating new business opportunities. Thus, expectations and demands for companies’ social impacts and sustainability from various stakeholders, such as shareholders, consumers, employees, and local communities, have begun to rise. This study focused on the distinctive factor of rapid economic growth, which characterizes Korean development, and analyzed the relationship between CSR and firm performance according to the industries’ growth rates. Regression analysis was conducted through multi-level analysis using data from a sample of 102 companies that prepared sustainability reports or ESG reports in Korea; the research results are as follows. First, CSR activities have a positive impact on firm performance. Second, when CSR activities increase, the firm performance increases faster for companies in the high-growth industry group than those in the low-growth industry group. Furthermore, we conducted additional analyses to examine the moderating effect of industry growth and found that companies in the high-growth industry group had higher overall CSR levels than those in the low-growth industry group. This study’s results provide meaningful implications for understanding how CSR affects a company’s economic performance and acts as a way to strike a balance between industrial development and fulfilling social responsibility. Full article

Under the new trend of digitalization leading the era, the popularity and development of digital finance have become key components in promoting better corporate practices and investment activities such as social responsibility fulfillment. Against the backdrop of the government’s advocacy of high-quality economic development, this article uses data from China’s A-share-listed companies from 2011–2021, based on the Digital Finance Index of Peking University and ESG rating data of China Securities Corporation, in order to analyze the impact of the level of digital finance development on corporate ESG performance in China, and to explore the paths and heterogeneity of such impacts. The results of the empirical analysis show that the level of digital finance development has a significant positive impact on corporate ESG performance, with financing constraints playing a mediating role in this path. In the heterogeneity analysis, we find that this impact shows a more significant effect among non-state-owned enterprises as well as enterprises in the central and western regions. The findings of the article’s empirical tests show that the continuous development of digital finance helps enterprises enable social responsibility, which has certain implications for the synergy between financial institutions, government departments, and corporate entities to promote high-quality economic development. Full article

This paper theoretically analyzes the bilateral mechanism of ESG responsibility fulfillment on green innovation of industrial enterprises and decomposes the promotion effect, inhibition effect and the net effect of mutual influence of ESG responsibility fulfillment on green innovation of Chinese industrial enterprises based on the data of 615 industrial enterprises in China from 2012 to 2021, and it analyzes the regular characteristics of them using bilateral stochastic frontier model. The study shows that (1) ESG responsibility fulfillment can drive green innovation in industrial enterprises. The interaction between the facilitation effect (24.49%) and the inhibiting effect (20.71%) of ESG responsibility fulfillment in industrial enterprises eventually leads to the actual green innovation level being higher than the frontier green innovation level by 3.78%. (2) The driving effect of ESG responsibility on green innovation of industrial enterprises has room for growth; the driving effect of ESG on green innovation gradually increases and turns from negative to positive with the improvement of ESG performance; and the net effect of ESG responsibility on the level of green innovation of industrial enterprises from 2012 to 2020 shows a continuous growth. (3) The driving effect of industrial enterprises’ ESG responsibility fulfillment on green innovation is the highest in the western region, followed by the eastern region, and it is the lowest in the central region. (4) Compared with industrial enterprises in regions with high managerial short-sightedness, non-heavy pollution and low marketization, the driving effect of ESG responsibility fulfillment on green innovation of industrial enterprises in regions with low managerial short-sightedness, heavy pollution and high marketization is stronger. Full article

The increasing focus on environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) has led to a growing interest in how firms’ internal behaviors affect their contributions in promoting sustainable economic development and fulfilling social responsibility. While previous studies have often explored the impact of internal controls on corporate investment decisions, little attention has been paid to the impact of internal controls on corporate green innovation. To this end, we explored the relationship between internal control, environmental investment, and green innovation using data from 2014–2019 for A-share listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen, China. The regression results show that there is a significant positive relationship between internal control and corporate green innovation. The improvement of internal control has a significant positive impact on firms’ active adoption of environmental protection investment. Environmental investment plays a partially mediating role in the process of internal control’s influence on green innovation. This implies that the effect of internal control on green innovation further affects green innovation through the indirect effect of environmental investment, in addition to the direct effect. Moreover, through further research, we find that the above influence relationship is significantly present in both heavily polluting and non-heavily polluting enterprises, as well as in state-owned and private enterprises, but is more significant in heavily polluting firms and private firms. Finally, this study responds to the debate on whether internal controls inhibit or promote enterprise innovation. We advocate further research on this issue in the future in terms of the differences in the accountability systems and customs of firms’ decision-making in different countries. Full article

Focusing on the 311 Chinese firms listed in the global markets from 2008 to 2019, based on the trade-off theory and the resource slack theory, using panel vector autoregressive model and panel threshold model, this paper explores the impact of fulfilling ESG responsibility on firm performance. The study reveals that in the short run, fulfilling ESG responsibility presents a “Substitution Effect,” whereas, in the long run, it presents a “Promotional Effect.” On the other hand, the improvement of firm performance has a significantly positive impact on ESG fulfillment investment, even though there is a strong hysteresis effect. Significant heterogeneity exists regarding the relationship between ESG fulfillment and firm performance. ESG fulfillment has a negative impact on firm performance in the short run, with the most affected firms being those small and mid-sized firms listed in the Mainland China markets. In the near term, the impact of firm performance on ESG fulfillment is positive, with those listed in the overseas markets and large firms being affected the most. The study reveals that firm size and the factors affiliated with ESG fulfillment tend to cause the differentiation effect in the inhibitory influence of ESG fulfillment on firm performance in the short run. This study could be used as a guideline for the social responsibilities of nonprofit organizations. Full article

The increasing awareness of climate change and human capital issues is shifting companies towards aspects other than traditional financial earnings. In particular, the changing behaviors towards sustainability issues of the global community and the availability of environmental, social and governance (ESG) indicators are attracting investors to socially responsible investment decisions. Furthermore, whereas the strategic importance of ESG metrics has been particularly studied for private enterprises, little attention have received public companies. To address this gap, the present work has three aims—1. To predict the accuracy of main financial indicators such as the expected Return of Equity (ROE) and Return of Assets (ROA) of public enterprises in Europe based on ESG indicators and other economic metrics; 2. To identify whether ESG initiatives affect the financial performance of public European enterprises; and 3. To discuss how ESG factors, based on the findings of aims #1 and #2, can contribute to the advancements of the current debate on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policies and practices in public enterprises in Europe. To fulfil the above aims, we use a combined approach of machine learning (ML) techniques and inferential (i.e., ordered logistic regression) model. The former predicts the accuracy of ROE and ROA on several ESG and other economic metrics and fulfils aim #1. The latter is used to test whether any causal relationships between ESG investment decisions and ROA and ROE exist and, whether these relationships exist, to assess their magnitude. The inferential analysis fulfils aim #2. Main findings suggest that ML accurately predicts ROA and ROE and indicate, through the ordered logistic regression model, the existence of a positive relationship between ESG practices and the financial indicators. In addition, the existing relationship appears more evident when companies invest in environmental innovation, employment productivity and diversity and equal opportunity policies. As a result, to fulfil aim #3 useful policy insights are advised on these issues to strengthen CSR strategies and sustainable development practices in European public enterprises. Full article