Does Digital Transformation Enhance Firm’s ESG Performance? Evidence from an Emerging Market

Yonggen Luo, Na Tian, Deli Wang and Wenqi Han

Emerging Markets Finance and Trade, 2024, vol. 60, issue 4, 825-854

Abstract: We examine the impact of digital transformation on a firm’s ESG performance using data from listed firms in China. Leveraging the recent advances in textual analysis, we quantify the extent of a firm’s digital transformation. The results show that digital transformation enhances a firm’s ESG performance. Moreover, results remain robust after addressing endogeneity problems and several robustness tests. In addition, we validate potential mechanisms that the digital transformation mainly improves the ESG performance of firms by improving the level of environmental performance, corporate social responsibility, and corporate governance. To examine the economic consequence, we find that digital transformation gains more government subsidies and analysts’ attention increasing the management’s positive tone at the earnings communication conferences by improving the firm’s ESG performance. Heterogeneity analysis suggests that the effect of digital transformation on ESG performance is stronger for firms in severely polluting industries and executives with information technology experience.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/1540496X.2023.2253975 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:mes:emfitr:v:60:y:2024:i:4:p:825-854

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/MREE20

DOI: 10.1080/1540496X.2023.2253975

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Emerging Markets Finance and Trade from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().