The impact of ESG performances on analyst report readability: Evidence from China

Jing Xu, Wei Wu and Xuan Feng

International Review of Financial Analysis, 2025, vol. 102, issue C

Abstract: It has been widely recognized that firms' environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performances are crucial for shaping their information environments. Nonetheless, the impact of ESG performances on important analyst report attributes still remains clear. Our study reveals that superior firm. ESG performances significantly enhance the analyst report readability. The mechanism analysis demonstrates that this effect is primarily driven by increased information accessibility (the information acquisition channel) and greater analysts' research efforts (the analyst effort channel). As expected, this effect is more pronounced in firms operating in highly polluted industries, firms with opaque financial infomration and state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Finally, our findings reveal that the release of analyst reports triggers higher market reactions for firms with superior ESG performances. In overall, our study highlights the criticial role of firm ESG performances in boosting financial analysts' information production process.

Keywords: ESG performance; Chinese market; analyst report readability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057521925001437
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:finana:v:102:y:2025:i:c:s1057521925001437

DOI: 10.1016/j.irfa.2025.104056

Access Statistics for this article

International Review of Financial Analysis is currently edited by B.M. Lucey

More articles in International Review of Financial Analysis from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().