The Impact of Corporate ESG Performance on Leverage Manipulation Empirical Evidence From A-Share Panel Data of Chinese Listed Companie

ESG stands for Environment (Environment), society (Social) and corporate governance (Government) respectively. It is a non-financial performance investment concept and enterprise evaluation standard, and has been used by enterprises as an important indicator to measure its quality. In the context of "deleveraging", there is a lack of targeted research on whether enterprise ESG performance can help enterprises "healthy" deleveraging. In this paper, the A-share listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets from 2008 to 2022 are selected as the original samples to explore the influence of ESG performance on the degree of leverage manipulation of enterprises. The empirical results show that good ESG performance can significantly reduce the degree of leverage manipulation of smes; In terms of mechanism test, ESG weakens enterprises' leverage manipulation motivation by reducing their own credit level, and enterprises' digital transformation inhibits their own leverage manipulation. Further heterogeneity test shows that ESG performance is better in eastern and central regions and state-owned enterprises. It is suggested that the ESG performance of enterprises should be further optimized and relevant supervision should be strengthened.