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.本研究从彭博（Bloomberg）数据库获取环境、社会和公司治理（ESG）评分，并通过Python编程语言从中国国家专利局官方网站（www.psssystem.gov.cn）采集的数据计算创新新颖性指标。其余经济特征数据则从国泰安（CSMAR）数据库采集。鉴于我国于2011年启动ESG绩效评价工作，本研究选取2011-2020年沪深交易所A股上市公司作为初始样本。随后对样本进行如下筛选：（1）剔除金融行业上市公司及特别处理（ST）公司；（2）剔除主要研究变量存在缺失值的样本；（3）对所有连续变量在1%水平上实施缩尾处理，以规避异常值的干扰。最终研究样本共包含9628个公司年度观测值。