Green Strategies and Firm Performance in the SAGE‐G20 Economies: ESG Disclosure, Circular Economy, and Regulatory Strength

ABSTRACT Increasing regulatory demands and pressure from stakeholders have increased the imperative of firms to incorporate the concept of sustainability in their business strategies. Here, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting and circular economy ( CE ) policies have become one of the primary ways in which companies strive to improve performance; the evidence on this point is inconsistent, especially in the context of nonhomogeneous institutional setups. This paper examines the effect of ESG disclosure and CE practices on firm performance in eight G20 economies in the interval of 2015–2023 and the moderating function of regulatory strength. The analysis uses a firm‐level panel dataset of 2880 observations to estimate cross‐sectional dependence, cross‐sectional heterogeneity, and endogeneity through the application of second‐generation econometric methods, namely, the cross‐sectionally augmented autoregressive distributed lag (CS‐ARDL) model and the system generalized method of moments (GMM). The findings show that both ESG disclosure and CE practices have a positive and significant impact on the performance of a firm. More precisely, a 1% shift in ESG disclosure relates to a one‐percentage‐point increase in firm performance, whereas CE adoption implies a 0.18% increment. Further, regulatory strength greatly intensifies these effects and provides support to the institutional theory with the demonstration that regulation increases the returns of performance to sustainability strategies. Sustainability practices and the performance of firms also have a bidirectional causality, which further indicates a self‐reinforcing relation. The results suggest that the transparency of ESG and circular economy operations is not an ethical liability but a strategic resource, the efficiency of which is determined by the quality of regulations. Sustainable value creation can be improved by policymakers and managers by matching regulatory frameworks with the sustainability integration at the firm level.