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.