A Study on the Mechanism of ESG’s Impact on Corporate Value under the Concept of Sustainable Development

With the deepening of the concept of sustainable development, the academic community has paid more and more attention to how enterprises can achieve value co-creation for multiple stakeholders from the perspective of corporate innovation. ESG is a new concept concerned with how to achieve sustainable development in enterprises in terms of environment, society, and corporate governance. However, there is still a lack of research on how to reshape the innovation processes of enterprises based on the new concept of sustainability and bring competitive value to corporate value. Based on this, we took the listed companies on the main board of the Shanghai and Shenzhen A-shares from 2010 to 2020 as the research object and empirically tested the impact effect of corporate ESG on corporate value, as well as the mediating effect of corporate innovation between corporate ESG and corporate value. At the same time, the institutional environment was incorporated as a moderating variable to further explore its influence mechanism. Finally, the heterogeneity of corporate ESG on corporate value was analyzed at both an enterprise level and a regional level. The results show that corporate ESG and its three sub-dimensions can significantly improve corporate value and innovation level; the internal mechanism shows that corporate innovation plays a mediating role between corporate ESG and its three sub-dimensions, while institutional environment play a moderating effect; non-state-owned enterprises’ ESG has a higher impact on corporate value than state-owned enterprises, especially in eastern China, where the value enhancement effect of ESG is more significant.