Environmental, Social, and Governance Performance and Corporate Innovation Novelty

We obtained the ESG scores from the Bloomberg database and calculated the novelty of innovation based on data collected from the official website of the China National Patent Office (www.psssystem.gov.cn) using the Python programming language. We collected the data on the other economic characteristics from the CSMAR database. Since China started to evaluate ESG performance in 2011, we selected A-share listed companies of the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 2011 to 2020 as the initial sample. We then screened the sample by (1) deleting financial industry firms and the special treatment firms, (2) eliminating samples with missing values for the main research variables, and (3) winsorizing all the continuous variables at the 1% level to avoid the influence of outliers. The final research sample contains 9,628 firm-year observations.