Can ESG Responsibility Fulfillment Enhance Corporate Value Creation?The Threshold Effect based on Digital Transformation
The ESG concept,which emphasizes the coordination and unity of ecological environment protection,social responsibility fulfillment and improvement of governance level,has received extensive attention from the theoretical circle and has become an important reference for measuring the sustainable development ability of enterprises.Most of the existing research explores the influence logic of ESG responsibility performance on enterprise value creation through corre-lation test,and the research perspective covers internal governance,external motivation,operating pressure and reputation ef-fect.At the same time,the linear relationship between the impact of enterprise digital transformation on ESG responsibility performance has been verified by a certain degree of experience,but there is little literature to discuss the internal logical re-lationship between digital transformation enabling ESG responsibility performance and strengthening enterprise value creation.In addition,although the potential impact of digital transformation is concerned in the selection of adjustment variables,it has not been further verified at the micro level of digital transformation degree and investment level,which leads to the lack of in-depth theoretical analysis of the non-linear relationship between ESG responsibility performance and value creation,and the lack of explanatory conclusions.Chinese A-share listed companies from 2011-2020 are selected as the research sample to empirically investigate the re-lationship between ESG responsibility fulfillment,digital transformation and corporate value creation.Research findings:First,ESG responsibility fulfillment is positively related to enterprise value creation.Second,there is a double threshold ef-fect of the value creation effect of ESG responsibility fulfillment enabled by digital transformation,with the increase of the depth of digital transformation and the level of investment in digital transformation,the impact of ESG responsibility fulfill-ment on enterprise value creation shows an inverted U-shaped threshold effect of increasing marginal effect and first pro-moting and then inhibiting.Third,non-state-owned enterprises ESG responsibility fulfillment is more positively affected by the threshold effect of the depth of digital transformation,and ESG responsibility fulfillment of state-owned enterprises is more positively affected by the threshold effect of the level of investment in digital transformation.In view of this,sugges-tions are made to enhance the awareness of ESG responsibility fulfillment,accelerate the pace of digital transformation,and play the role of government macro-regulation to promote the integration of digital transformation and ESG concept and en-hance the value creation ability of enterprises.Compared with the existing literature,the possible research contributions of this paper are as follows:in terms of research perspective,this paper introduces the background of digital transformation,integrates ESG responsibility fulfill-ment,digital transformation and enterprise value creation into a holistic analysis framework,reveals that digital transforma-tion enables ESG responsibility fulfillment and strengthens enterprise value creation effect,and expands the research horizon of ESG responsibility fulfillment in the context of digital economy.In terms of mechanism analysis,focusing on the depth of digital transformation and the level of investment in digital transformation,this paper empirically tests the threshold effect of digital transformation enabling ESG responsibility fulfillment to strengthen enterprise value creation,enriches the research content of non-linear correlation of ESG responsibility fulfillment in the context of digital economy,and makes up for the pos-sibility or deficiency of existing literature focusing on single research of linear relationship.In terms of heterogeneity analy-sis,the heterogeneity test of the threshold effect of digital transformation depth and digital transformation investment level based on the nature of property rights is implemented to explore whether there is a significant difference between state-owned enterprises and non-state-owned enterprises in digital transformation enabling ESG responsibility fulfillment and strengthening enterprise value creation,so as to provide empirical evidence for the high-quality development of enterprises.
ESG responsibility fulfillmentcorporate value creationdigital transformation
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