Data on various ESG ratings of sample companies and selected personal data of company executives

The initial sample of this study covers the A-share companies listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges during the period 2008-2021. We then screened and processed the initial sample data, including (a) Screening for companies with both RepRisk's ESG rating and Bloomberg's ESG rating. Specifically, the selection is based on samples with the same ISIN code and companies' English names in the Bloomberg and RepRisk lndex (RRI) databases. The ISIN code is a securities coding standard developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and is a unique code used to identify securities in each country or region around the world. We exclude samples that do not provide ISIN codes or have inconsistent English names. (b) We exclude observations with missing values for the main variables. (c) We exclude the ST, *ST and PT trading status samples during the observation period. Our final sample contains 1456 firm-year observations.The ESG disclosure score data and ESG performance score data required for the ESG-washing construction are respectively obtained from the Bloomberg database and the RepRisk Index (RRI) database of the Wharton Research Centre for Data Studies (WRDS). Positive media coverage data is sourced from the China Research Data Services Platform (CNRDS), while the instrumental variable (IV_population) is obtained from the EPS database and Juhe Data (https://www.gotohui.com/). Unless otherwise stated, all other data in this study are from the China Stock Market and Accounting Research (CSMAR) database.Data on executive company changes were collected manually by the authors back-to-back and independently. Then we compared and reconciled the data collected by each, and where there were discrepancies, we again collected and calibrated the data to maximize their reliability. We first obtained executive biographies from the CSMAR database, and the missing values were retrieved from Sina Finance ( https://finance.sina.com.cn/). Due to the unstructured nature of the resume data, we manually processed more than 30,000 resumes of executives to get the data of executives' company changes, based on which we calculated the per capita number of job hops of all executives in each company. The number of part-time jobs held by executives also reflects their pursuit of career changes and development, so in the robustness test the per capita mean of the number of part-time jobs held by executives is used as a proxy variable for careerist orientation. These data can be obtained directly from the CSMAR database.