This paper investigates how environmental, social, and governance (ESG) efficiency impacts corporate innovation, highlighting its role as a crucial indicator of resource utilization within firms. Analyzing data from A-share listed companies in China between 2009 and 2021, we find that ESG efficiency levels are positively correlated with corporate innovation outputs. This indicates that higher ESG efficiency contributes to greater innovation. Our result also reveals that the relationship between ESG efficiency and corporate innovation is moderated by the firm's ownership structure. Specifically, the negative moderating effects of ownership are more pronounced in regions with lower economic development or stringent environmental regulations. Technology-based firms are particularly affected, exhibiting greater vulnerability to these negative effects. These findings confirm that ESG efficiency is a significant mechanism linking ESG practices to enhanced innovation capabilities. By exploring both the efficiency aspects of ESG performance and the institutional factors influencing ESG-innovation dynamics, our study makes a notable contribution to the literature, offering new insights into how effective ESG practices can strategically drive innovation within firms.
Greenwashing is a fraudulent environmental, social and governance (ESG) behavior. Previous literature has explored the impact of unidirectional disclosure on greenwashing. However, how interactive disclosures affect greenwashing has not been fully explored. Given the background of the regulatory transformation of China's capital market, we use data from the Q&A boards of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SZSE) “Interactive Easy” and Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE) “SSE e-Interactive” online platforms to investigate the impact of interactive disclosure between firms and retail investors on greenwashing. We find that online platform interactions (OPIs) inhibit greenwashing. Moreover, such negative effects are more pronounced for firms with high-quality internal controls, high executive shareholding, high analyst coverage, low financing constraints, and executives with overseas backgrounds. Overall, our research provides empirical evidence that OPIs improve capital market efficiency by inhibiting greenwashing.
The relationship between ESG and firm value has been a relevant subject of study in recent years. We conducted a hybrid literature review to understand the literature's findings on this relationship and its implications in terms of cost of capital. First, a keyword co-occurrence analysis on a 122 ABS ranked journals articles selection from Scopus database was adopted to identify and investigate the main research fields of the current literature. Then a content analysis through the bibliographic coupling of the most globally cited contributions was made, defining a final sample of 50 articles obtained through a minimum threshold of at least 15 total global citations (TGCs). We found that studies on the cost of debt configuration are more aimed at determining the implications on firm value, while most contributions on the cost of equity focus on the assessment of the risk–return profile for the investor or the construction of an ESG portfolio. Furthermore, we found that most of the literature has a consensus view on the lack of transparency behind the ESG ratings and their construction methodology, stating that disagreement on ESG ratings not only limits the results of empirical analysis, but can also negatively affect firm value due to a higher level of uncertainty.
Our natural environment is suffering the consequences of the current highly dynamic and competitive social and economic conditions that force people and firms to mainly focus on economic outputs rather than in reducing their impact on the environment. In this context, environmentally aware leaders can play a key role in driving the development and implementation of sustainable practices within organizations, as well as the development an adequate organizational culture that promotes the engagement of its members. The objective of this research is to empirically evidence the influence of green transformational leadership on green performance, as well as the mediating role of green organizational culture and green engagement in this relationship. The results provide empirical evidence on the positive influence of green transformational leadership on green performance, as well as about the mediating variables raised, which has interesting practical, political and theoretical implications, related to the strategic management of firms, the promotion of environmental sustainability in corporate governance and industry standards, and the broader understanding of sustainable leadership in the academic sphere. Thus, this study provides a roadmap to embrace a leadership model that prioritizes environmental sustainability, advocating for a collective journey toward a sustainable future where leadership, culture, and commitment coalesce into a formidable force for environmental sustainability. It is concluded that there is a need for a paradigm shift where leadership integrates sustainability into the ethos of organizational culture.
Despite several studies on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and innovation on firm performance, the extent to which different CSR practices interacts with distinct innovation types in enhancing firm performance remains underexplored. We draw on contingency theory to examine how internal and external CSR interacts with exploitative and explorative innovation to improve firm performance. We discuss the interaction effects using a panel dataset of 1156 publicly listed Chinese firms that disclosed CSR and innovation information from 2008 to 2019. The results indicate that firms with high-internal CSR benefit to a greater extent from explorative innovation than from exploitative innovation as a means of enhancing performance. In contrast, firms with high-external CSR benefit to a greater extent from exploitative innovation than from explorative innovation to improve performance. We contribute to strategy and CSR literature by revealing how firms match specific CSR practices with distinct innovation types to enhance firm performance.
By investigating a sample of industrial Italian listed firms for the years 2003–2020, this research aims to explore two main relationships. First, the study examines the association between the ratio of female directors and CSR strategy score in both family and nonfamily firms. Second, it investigates the link between family female directors and nonfamily female directors within the subsample of family firms. The empirical findings show the existence of a positive link between the ratio of female directors and CSR strategy score only in the subsample of family firms and that this result is driven by the percentage of nonfamily female directors. Additional analyses, aiming to elucidate the heterogeneity of family female directors, report that family females who have an executive role on the board are beneficial for the CSR strategy score, whereas family females who are interlocked and with long tenure are detrimental for the CSR strategy score.