Industry-University-Research Collaboration and Corporate ESG Performance

This study focuses on A-share companies listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 2009 to 2022, a period chosen because China began disclosing ESG ratings and related data in 2009. Data on IUR collaborations were sourced from the National Patent Office, while ESG performance data were obtained from the Bloomberg database. Additional financial data for listed companies were collected from the CSMAR and Wind databases.
To ensure data quality, the following firms were excluded from the initial sample: (1) firms with missing data, (2) special treatment companies , and (3) firms in the financial and insurance industries. After applying these filters, the final sample consisted of 10,035 firm-year observations. To mitigate the influence of outliers, continuous variables were winsorized at the 1% upper and lower levels.