Educational background of board secretaries and corporate ESG performance: Evidence from China

In 2013, the China Securities Regulatory Commission re-issued the Guidance Opinions on the Implementation of Social Responsibility by Listed Companies, which demanded that listed companies should disclose ESG information in their reports. Therefore, we used data on China’s A-share listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen from 2013 to 2022 as the research sample. Financial and corporate governance data were sourced from the China Stock Market & Accounting Research Database and China Research Data Service Platform . The enterprises’ ESG performance data were obtained from the Sino-Securities Index Information (SSII) ESG rating system. We further screened our data by excluding data from four types of companies: (1) companies lacking ESG ratings, (2) companies in the financial industry, (3) listed companies with Special Treatment, and (4) companies with missing financial data and anomalies in the relevant data. Finally, we obtained 26,922 firm-year observations for the empirical analysis.

2013年，中国证监会重新发布了《上市公司社会责任实施指引》，要求上市公司在其报告中披露环境、社会和治理（ESG）信息。鉴于此，本研究选取了2013年至2022年间上海和深圳A股上市公司数据作为研究样本。财务和公司治理数据来源于中国股票市场与会计研究数据库及中国研究数据服务平台。企业ESG绩效数据则从中证指数信息（SSII）ESG评级系统中获取。在此基础上，我们对数据进行筛选，排除以下四类公司：缺乏ESG评级的企业、金融行业企业、享受特殊待遇的上市公司以及存在财务数据缺失和异常的公司。经过筛选，最终获得了26,922个企业-年度观测值，以进行实证分析。