The impact of ESG performance of heavily polluting enterprises on new quality productivity

This paper selects 1454 listed heavy-polluting enterprises from 2009 to 2023 as a sample to empirically investigate the impact of corporate ESG performance on new-quality productivity. The results show that improving corporate ESG per-formance has a positive effect on enhancing the level of new-quality productiv-ity. Mechanism analysis indicates that the shareholding ratio of insti-tutional investors plays a mediating role between the two. Heterogeneity analy-sis re-veals that the improvement of corporate ESG performance has a more sig-nificant effect on new-quality productivity in large-scale enterprises, industries with weak competitiveness, and enterprises with a higher proportion of female man-agement. The findings provide a new perspective for the antecedent re-search of new-quality productivity and offer empirical evidence for enhancing corporate ESG performance.