With the development of sustainable investment,ESG information has become an important dimension for investors to assess the development potential of an enterprise.However,due to the significant differences in the ESG evaluation criteria of different rating agencies,there exists substantial disagreement among ESG rating agencies,which hinders the operations and development of enterprises.Based on ESG ratings from five agencies in China from 2018 to 2021,we uncover that ESG disagreement is widespread among Chinese listed companies and is on the rise year by year.Meanwhile,rating agencies'various information evaluation methods,as well as companies'different ESG governance abilities and attention,are main factors of ESG rating disagreements.Empirical results show that companies with more ESG incidents,more voluntary information disclosure,and higher attention to environmental problems experience higher ESG disagreements.Moreover,introducing more scholars,women,youngsters and people with overseas experience into board of directors could perhaps mitigate this disagreement.It is recommended to accel-erate the establishment of unified and standardized corporate ESG data standards and evaluation methodology,pro-mote standardized information disclosure systems and environmentally friendly internal control system,effectively re-duce the negative impacts of ESG divergences.
ESG Rating SystemESG Rating DisagreementVoluntary Information DisclosureManagement Charac-teristics
维普
万方数据
