How Executives' Green Awareness Affects Corporate ESG Performance: Empirical Evidence based on Green Investment Intermediation Mechanisms and Environmental Dimensions

Abstract

Against the backdrop of "dual carbon" goals and highquality development, ESG performance has become an important indicator for measuring a company's sustainable development capabilities. Based on a sample of A-share listed companies in China from 2009 to 2024, this paper constructs an executive green awareness index, adopts a two-way fixed-effects model to empirically examine the impact of executive green awareness on corporate ESG performance, and further conducts an in-depth analysis from the environmental dimension perspective and the mediating mechanism of green investment. The empirical results indicate that executive green awareness significantly enhances corporate ESG performance, with such an effect mainly manifested in the environmental dimension. Furthermore, green investment exerts a partial mediating effect on the relationship between executive green awareness and corporate environmental performance. Robustness tests show that the above conclusions still hold after using lagged variables and replacement variables. This paper enriches the research on the influencing factors of corporate ESG performance from the perspective of executive cognition, and provides micro-level empirical evidence for enterprises’ green transformation and environmental governance practices.