When Does ESG Enhance Export Resilience? The Moderating Role of ESG in the Innovation Response to Trade Policy Shocks

Maintaining export resilience against trade policy shocks is a critical challenge for industrial exporters amid rising global trade protectionism. Treating the 2018 US–China trade friction as a quasi-natural experiment, this study examines the interactive effects of research and development (R&D) capability and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance based on panel data of Chinese A-share listed manufacturing firms from 2015 to 2024. Measuring export resilience via annual export growth deviations relative to the pre-shock benchmark, our continuous Difference-in-Differences (DID) estimates show that trade policy shocks significantly reduce corporate export resilience, whereas robust pre-shock R&D capability serves as a core buffer that mitigates this adverse impact. Furthermore, a quadruple interaction model indicates that ESG performance positively moderates the buffering effect of R&D rather than functioning as an independent buffer on its own. Marginal-effect comparisons confirm that the protective value of ESG is conditional on a firm’s innovation capacity; when R&D capability is weak, high ESG performance alone offers limited protection against tariff pressures. Overall, R&D capability and ESG performance exhibit synergistic complementarity in sustaining export resilience under external trade shocks.