ESG Rating Disagreement and Stock Price Crash Risk: Evidence from Chinese A-Share Listed Companies

Environmental, social and governance (ESG) ratings issued by different agencies frequently point in opposite directions, yet it remains unsettled whether such disagreement helps market participants or confuses them. Drawing on a panel of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2018 to 2024, we measure rating disagreement as the dispersion among three domestic raters—Huazheng, Wind, and SynTao Green Finance—and relate it to subsequent crash risk. Pooled two-way fixed effects estimates yield no significant average relation, indicating that the noise channel and the information channel embedded in disagreement counterbalance each other. Tests based on stock price synchronicity do not detect an information channel at the aggregate level. Splitting the sample by analyst forecast dispersion, however, uncovers a sharp boundary condition: disagreement is followed by significantly lower crash risk only among firms whose information environment is relatively transparent, and the contrast between groups is significant at the 5% level. Disagreement therefore behaves as information where investors are able to verify it and as noise where they are not. Implications for rating-market regulation, disclosure policy, and rating users are discussed.