Righteousness generates profit, evergreen waters flow: A study on the influence of merchant guild culture on corporate green transformation

Merchant guild culture embodies the operational norms and managerial philosophies that have emerged from millennia of commercial practice in China, exerting a profound influence on firms' value systems and strategic decision-making. From the perspective of cultural inheritance, this study employs a sample of Chinese A-share listed companies over the period 2011–2023 to empirically examine the impact of merchant guild culture on corporate green development. The results indicate that merchant guild culture significantly facilitates firms' green transformation, and this finding remains robust across a series of sensitivity tests. Further analyses incorporating contextual factors—including government, market, societal, and firm-level conditions—reveal that local governments' environmental preferences, market environments, social supervision, and corporate governance structures all reinforce the positive effect of merchant guild culture on green transformation. Mechanism tests suggest that merchant guild culture promotes green transformation through multiple channels, including fostering cooperative spirit, reducing agency costs, and alleviating financing constraints. Moreover, digitalization and intelligent transformation amplify the enabling role of merchant guild culture in advancing corporate green transformation. In turn, the green transformation outcomes induced by such cultural influences contribute to firms’ long-term development and value enhancement. By adopting a micro-level firm perspective, this study elucidates the role of merchant guild culture in shaping corporate green transformation behavior, and provides both theoretical justification and empirical evidence for the importance of informal institutions.