Research on the Impact of ESG Performance on Firm Performance: A Case Study of China’s A-Share Listing
Zhenrui Zhang
- School of Economics, Capital University of Economics and Business, Beijing, China
- Manuscript received April 6, 2026
- accepted May 20, 2006
- published September 2, 2026
Abstract
In the context of sustainable development, Environment, Society and corporate Governance (ESG) has gradually become an important factor affecting the long-term value of enterprises. With the strengthening of supervision and the change of investor preferences, the ESG performance of enterprises not only reflects their ability to fulfill social responsibilities, but also becomes an important indicator to measure their sustainable development level. Using Chinese A-share listed companies as research samples, this paper constructs an empirical model of the relationship between ESG performance and enterprise performance, and systematically examines the impact of ESG performance on enterprise performance. The results show that ESG performance can significantly improve corporate performance, indicating that actively fulfilling environmental responsibility, optimizing corporate governance and strengthening social responsibility input are conducive to enhancing corporate value creation ability. Furthermore, after controlling for a series of enterprise characteristic variables and conducting robustness tests—such as the substitute variable test and sample adjustment—the core conclusions remain robust. The results of mechanism analysis show that ESG mainly plays a role by promoting the innovation capability of enterprises, that is, good ESG performance can encourage enterprises to increase innovation investment and improve technology level, so as to achieve performance improvement.
Keywords
- ESG performance
- enterprise performance
- green innovation
- environmental regulation
How to Cite
Zhenrui Zhang, "Research on the Impact of ESG Performance on Firm Performance: A Case Study of China’s A-Share Listing," Journal of Economics, Business and Management, pp. 187-191, 2026.
Copyright & License
Copyright © 2026 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).