Data of manuscript.

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) plays an important role in corporate sustainability. In June 2018, the People’s Bank of China (China’s central bank) decided to expand the scope of the Medium-Term Lending Facility (MLF) collateral to include green bonds issued by companies. This study investigates the impact of the PBOC’s policy of integrating green bonds into the collateral framework on corporate ESG performance, specifically by alleviating financing constraints and fostering green innovation. Specifically, this study takes the Expanded Pledge Framework Policy (EPCF) of the Central Bank as a quasi-natural experiment and uses the panel data of China’s A-share listed companies from 2014 to 2022 to investigate the causal relationship between EPCF and corporate ESG performance through the differential method (DID) and other methods. The results show that EPCF can improve the ESG performance of enterprises by easing the financing constraints of enterprises and promoting the green technology innovation of enterprises. On average, implementing an EPCF improves the relative ESG performance of an organization by about 0.02 units. In addition, through the parallel trend test and the results of existing literature, it can be seen that although enterprises issuing green bonds can improve ESG performance, the range is still limited, and EPCF has a greater improvement in the ESG performance of non-heavy polluting enterprises. More importantly, the implementation of EPCF is more effective in regions with a higher degree of marketization and in coastal areas. Our model has withstood extensive robustness checks.

环境、社会和公司治理（Environmental, Social and Governance, ESG）在企业可持续发展领域发挥着重要作用。2018年6月，中国人民银行（中国央行）决定将中期借贷便利（Medium-Term Lending Facility, MLF）的担保品范围扩大至企业发行的绿色债券。本研究聚焦中国人民银行将绿色债券纳入担保品框架的政策对企业ESG表现的影响，具体通过缓解企业融资约束、推动绿色创新两大路径开展分析。具体而言，本研究以央行扩大担保品框架政策（Expanded Pledge Framework Policy, EPCF）为准自然实验，采用2014至2022年中国A股上市公司的面板数据，通过双重差分法（Difference-in-Differences, DID）等方法探究EPCF与企业ESG表现之间的因果关系。研究结果显示，EPCF可通过缓解企业融资约束、促进企业绿色技术创新，有效提升企业ESG表现。平均来看，实施EPCF可使企业相对ESG表现提升约0.02个单位。此外，通过平行趋势检验与既有文献验证可知，尽管发行绿色债券的企业能够改善自身ESG表现，但提升幅度相对有限；而EPCF对非重污染企业的ESG表现提升效果更为显著。更为关键的是，EPCF的政策效果在市场化程度更高的地区与沿海地区表现更为突出。本研究模型通过了多维度稳健性检验。