ESG performance and corporate AI disclosure: evidence from Chinese listed firms

This study examines whether corporate ESG performance is associated with firms’ AI-related disclosure. Using 12,814 firm-year observations from Chinese A-share listed firms during 2020–2023, we construct two text-based indicators capturing whether firms articulate an AI strategy and disclose AI governance information in their ESG reports. Logistic regressions with year and industry fixed effects and firm-clustered standard errors show that overall ESG performance – and the governance pillar in particular – is positively and significantly associated with both disclosure outcomes. These associations are robust to one-year lagged specifications, propensity-score matching and Oster coefficient-stability bounds. The findings suggest that AI-related disclosure is embedded in firms’ broader sustainability reporting infrastructure, with positive associations observed for the environmental, social and governance pillars alike. This study contributes to the voluntary disclosure literature by developing firm-level measures of AI disclosure from ESG report text and by providing early evidence on the ESG–AI disclosure link in an emerging market, and by discussing conditional implications for investors, regulators and standard setters concerned with responsible AI reporting. Additional temporal analyses show that the ESG–AI disclosure association is substantially stronger during 2022–2023 than during 2020–2021.