Executive Equity Incentives and ESG Greenwashing

Our sample comprises A-share firms listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 2009 to 2022. We exclude financial institutions, observations flagged as special treatment, and firm-years with missing variables used in the baseline specification. The final panel contains 10,501 firm-year observations. ESG performance is measured using Huazheng ESG scores from WIND database; ESG disclosure information is drawn from Bloomberg; and accounting and market variables are obtained from the China Securities Market and Accounting Research database and China Research Data Services. Continuous variables are winsorized at the 1st and 99th percentiles to limit the influence of outliers. All datasets are merged at the firm-year level using standard security identifiers.