Research On The Impact Of China’s Capital Market Opening On Corporate ESG Performance

China’s capital market was established relatively late.In recent years,the exploration of capital market opening is gradually moving from unilateral opening at the beginning to two-way opening at present.It has been four years since A-shares were included in the MSCI index as A milestone in the opening up of China’s capital market.Our capital markets have been recognized by more and more international investors,and more and more companies have been included in the MSCI index.Enterprise ESG,as an evaluation tool that focuses on the performance of enterprises on environment,society and corporate governance,is increasingly incorporated into the investment decision-making system by investment institutions.In addition,all the A-share listed companies included in MSCI need to accept the ESG evaluation,which also promotes the research and exploration of ESG in domestic academic circles,major institutions and listed companies.Taking the important capital market opening event of "A shares being included in MSCI Index" as an opportunity,this thesis uses differential model to study the impact of China’s expanding capital market opening on corporate ESG.In this thesis,DID model is constructed to deeply study the impact of the exogenous event of A-shares’ inclusion in MSCI index on corporate ESG,and the endogenous problem in the study is overcome by the propensity score matching method.The empirical results show that:the inclusion of open capital market enterprises in the MSCI index is a policy event that can boost the ESG of enterprises,and the above conclusions are verified by the fractal regression to different degrees.In the mechanism study,it is found that the opening of capital market increases the participation of institutional investors and thus improves the ESG of enterprises,and institutional investment plays an intermediary effect.Heterogeneity analysis shows that the impact of MSCI inclusion on ESG of enterprises with low media attention is more obvious than that of enterprises with high media attention.The empirical evidence in this thesis helps us to clearly understand the important role of capital market opening in promoting the healthy development of A shares.It also provides theoretical support for the policy of further opening up of Chinese capital market,and provides relevant suggestions for participants’ guides,evaluators,investors and practitioners in the ESG ecological chain.At the same time also for the future to continue to expand the composition and weight of A shares in the MSCI index after the effect of the reference.