In recent years, the nexus between Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors and corporate green innovation has captured the attention of academics, investors, and policy makers alike. A groundbreaking study by Song and Ma (2025) advances this discourse by providing compelling evidence on how ESG performance influences firms’ engagement in environmentally sustainable innovation, highlighting the nuanced role of public attention as a nonlinear moderator. This research, published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, underscores the complex mechanisms driving corporate green innovation within today’s dynamic socio-economic landscape.
The authors employ rigorous econometric analyses to verify the robustness of their findings, employing a comprehensive approach to validate the relationship between ESG metrics and green innovation output. Initially, they explore the substitution of key independent variables to ensure that their core relationships remain intact when alternative proxies are utilized. For instance, Bloomberg ESG ratings replace proprietary ESG scores in early regression models, maintaining the observed positive association with green innovation measures. Additionally, the number of green patents granted—rather than the number of green patent applications—is incorporated as an alternative dependent variable to sustain the credibility of their conclusions.
This methodological substitution is crucial, considering that patent applications might reflect intended innovation while granted patents indicate authoritative recognition of green technological advancements. The authors find consistent results across these alternative specifications, which strengthens the argument that ESG commitments genuinely foster substantive green innovation outcomes. These robustness assessments add substantial weight to their empirical claims, ensuring that model idiosyncrasies or specific variable constructions do not undermine the validity of their key insights.
Beyond variable replacement, Song and Ma recognize the potential endogeneity challenges inherent in analyzing ESG and innovation dynamics. To address this concern, they implement an instrumental variable (IV) approach via two-stage least squares (2SLS) regression techniques, employing four distinctive instruments to isolate exogenous variation in ESG performance. These include lagged ESG measures, geographic exposure to natural disasters, regional charitable giving levels, and the proportion of ESG fund holdings in the firm’s shareholder base. Each instrument is carefully selected to meet relevance and exclusion criteria, capturing distinct exogenous shocks or social factors influencing ESG engagement.
Significantly, the instrumental variables employed pass rigorous diagnostic tests, including the Anderson canonical correlation LM test for under-identification, the Cragg-Donald Wald F statistic for weak instruments, and the Anderson-Rubin test for assessing instrument strength. The successful passage of these tests lends credence to the use of IV estimation in this context, effectively mitigating bias arising from reverse causality or omitted variable confounding. The robust instrumental variable analyses reaffirm that high ESG scores causally promote green innovation, solidifying the study’s contribution to the literature on sustainable corporate strategies.
Understanding that macroeconomic context shapes firm behavior, the research also integrates industry-by-year interaction fixed effects alongside province fixed effects into key regression frameworks. This inclusion accounts for heterogeneity in economic conditions, regulatory environments, and industrial trends that might otherwise cloud the isolated effect of ESG on green innovation. Remarkably, even after these comprehensive controls for macro factors, the positive linkage between ESG engagement and green innovation output persists, signaling the resilience of this relationship across varied economic contexts.
Another layer of refinement involves tightening firm-level controls by substituting industry fixed effects with firm fixed effects in the analytical models. While incorporating firm fixed effects may sacrifice some cross-sectional variation essential for identifying certain effects, it strengthens internal validity by controlling for unobserved, time-invariant attributes unique to each firm. The authors find that this stricter modeling choice does not alter their core conclusions: the impact of ESG on green innovation remains statistically significant and the characteristic “inverted U-shaped” moderating effect of public attention on this relationship continues to manifest.
The discovery of an inverted U-shaped curve concerning public attention provides particularly intriguing insights into how stakeholder awareness influences corporate responsiveness. At moderate levels of public scrutiny, firms appear incentivized to amplify their green innovation efforts, reflecting strategic alignment with growing environmental and social expectations. However, beyond a certain threshold, excessive public attention may elicit diminishing returns or even adverse consequences, possibly due to reputational risk management costs or stakeholder fatigue. These nonlinear dynamics emphasize the intricate balancing firms must navigate between transparency, accountability, and innovation investment.
Collectively, these robustness checks and methodological rigor enhance the confidence in Song and Ma’s claims, illuminating the conditions under which ESG strategies translate into tangible green technological progress. Their findings have profound implications for investors seeking to assess firm sustainability performance, regulators aiming to foster innovation-driven green transitions, and corporate leaders strategizing ESG integration. By unpacking the subtleties of public attention’s role, the study informs a more sophisticated approach to stakeholder engagement and communication practices in sustainability domains.
Furthermore, this research intersects with broader economic and social phenomena, suggesting that regional attributes—such as natural disaster vulnerability and philanthropic culture—play instrumental roles in shaping firms’ environmental strategies. Recognizing these interconnected factors offers new avenues for policy interventions that leverage local socio-environmental contexts to stimulate corporate green innovation. This multidimensional perspective opens the door to nuanced policymaking that aligns external incentives with internal organizational capabilities and stakeholder expectations.
The study’s empirical framework, combining alternative variable treatments, advanced instrumental variable techniques, and extensive fixed effects modeling, exemplifies a best-practice approach for causal inference in sustainability research. Beyond academic rigor, such stringent evaluation enhances the practical relevance of findings for real-world application. ESG practitioners can harness these insights to better calibrate investment selections and risk assessments, while innovators may draw lessons for optimizing responsiveness to stakeholder pressures without succumbing to counterproductive overexposure.
In an era marked by accelerating climate challenges and heightened societal demands for corporate responsibility, understanding how ESG initiatives catalyze green innovation is paramount. Song and Ma’s research contributes a critical piece to this puzzle by not only documenting positive associations but also elucidating the boundary conditions shaped by public attention dynamics. Their work invites further exploration into how nuanced stakeholder perceptions modulate sustainability outcomes, encouraging deeper interdisciplinary collaboration among environmental economists, management scholars, and communication specialists.
By synthesizing comprehensive quantitative evidence with theoretical insights into nonlinear moderation, this study sets a new benchmark in the analysis of ESG-driven innovation processes. Its replicable analytical design and transparent reporting of robustness checks provide a valuable template for subsequent inquiries into the multifaceted relationships governing sustainable corporate transformation. As ESG metrics become standard decision-making tools, such empirical clarity is essential to optimize their predictive validity and policy impact.
Ultimately, Song and Ma’s findings reverberate across multiple facets of sustainability science, corporate governance, and innovation management. They underscore that ESG efforts are not merely symbolic gestures but can materially influence the pace and direction of green technological development. The nuanced interplay with public attention furthermore highlights the strategic complexities firms face in leveraging external pressures constructively. This layered understanding advances both academic theory and practical ESG stewardship in equal measure.
As industries worldwide grapple with the combined imperatives of environmental stewardship and competitive innovation, these insights offer timely guidance. Firms that strategically engage ESG principles and calibrate their public communication stand to unlock significant innovation potential, contributing to broader climate goals while strengthening their market positioning. Policymakers and investors are similarly empowered to refine instruments and criteria that spotlight genuine innovation contributions, making ESG a transformative rather than nominal corporate mandate.
In conclusion, this meticulous study provides robust, multi-faceted evidence that ESG commitment positively drives corporate green innovation. It clarifies how public attention modulates this effect in nonlinear ways and validates these findings across alternative specifications, instrumental variable approaches, and fixed effects structures. The work of Song and Ma represents a pivotal advancement in understanding the dynamic interface between sustainable governance, innovation activity, and stakeholder engagement in the contemporary corporate milieu.
Subject of Research: Corporate ESG performance and its impact on green innovation moderated by public attention.
Article Title: ESG and green innovation: nonlinear moderation of public attention.
Article References:
Song, C., Ma, W. ESG and green innovation: nonlinear moderation of public attention. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 12, 667 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-05002-8
Image Credits: AI Generated
