ESG Scores and Corporate Leverage: Firm-Level Evidence from East Asia and ASEAN

Asian markets are phasing in mandatory sustainability disclosure, yet whether ESG scores relate to leverage, and whether the regime conditions that, remains open. Two-way fixed-effects models are fitted to 841 firms over 2017–2023 and 856 over 2010–2023 in eight East Asian and ASEAN markets, with each estimate read under assumptions weakening to a wild cluster bootstrap. The level coefficient is indistinguishable from zero once inference accounts for the clustering hierarchy: on the unbalanced book-leverage panel, p rises from 0.0019 to 0.2543 while the coefficient does not move, and one standard deviation of the score shifts leverage at most 43 basis points. Joint tests support curvature in none of twelve cells, and the disclosure mandate conditions nothing: interaction p runs 0.171 to 0.918, the marginal slope indistinguishable from zero throughout. What is suggestive sits on the adjustment margin, and only within 2017–2023, where deviation from target interacts with ESG at 0.0338 under firm clustering and firms close 44.2 percent of the market-leverage gap yearly. The 2010–2023 window does not confirm it, returning 0.0037 with a tighter standard error, though the two cannot be told apart. The disagreement here is largely one of inference.