The Impact Of ESG Rating Information On Investors’ Decision-Making

With the promotion of the concept of global sustainable development,ESG(Environment,Social and Governance)has attracted more and more attention worldwide,and it has become the consensus of regulators and market parties to take ESG into consideration for investment.At present,90% of the world’s large multinational enterprises take the initiative to publicly disclose their ESG performance.However,as the supporting force of our economic transformation,the listed companies have frequently exposed negative environmental,social and governance events,and ESG management and risk prevention need to be improved.Poorly managed ESGs are also losing their appeal to consumers,employees and investors.In 2018,China Securities Regulatory Commission revised the Corporate Governance Code,requiring listed companies to build a basic framework for ESG information disclosure.In September 2020,China clearly proposed the goals of "carbon peak" in 2030 and "carbon neutrality" in 2060.The policy continues to focus on the ESG performance of listed companies and the need to achieve the dual-carbon target,so it remains to be tested whether the ESG rating information will have an impact on investor decision-making.This paper will study the relationship between the two,combined with the background of Chinese system,aims to provide new ideas for faster and better ESG development and construction of domestic listed companies,provide reference suggestions for government regulatory departments to improve the quality of Chinese ESG information disclosure and the development of ESG rating system,and provide investment ideas rich in ESG factors for stock market investors.Based on the ESG rating information disclosure data of domestic listed companies provided by China Securities ESG rating Agency and with the help of Guotai ’an database,this paper manually selects and collects the relevant information of listed companies in China’s A-share heavily polluting industries,mainly using the event research method: First,2019 to 2021 is selected as the time interval of the event study,and the grouped empirical research on listed companies in heavily polluting industries is carried out from the perspectives of ESG rating changes and the nature of corporate equity.Second,since the stock price is the sum of all participants’ operations,a comparative analysis will be made on the performance of the company’s ESG rating and the changes in the shareholding ratio of institutional investors,in order to provide a supplementary demonstration to the research conclusions of this paper.Based on the above research and analysis,the final conclusion is drawn: ESG rating information will have an impact on investors’ decision-making,and the rise and change of ESG rating will have a short-term positive impact on investors’ decision-making.There is no significant difference in investors’ attention to ESG rating information between state-owned enterprises and non-state-owned enterprises.The changing trend of ESG ratings towards good companies also shows a trend of increasing investor shareholding performance.Finally,combined with the research results of this paper,the author tries to put forward targeted suggestions for the company involved in ESG implementation,the government involved in ESG implementation and supervision,and the investors affected by ESG evaluation information.