Companies use corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosures to communicate their social and environmental policies, practices, and performance to stakeholders. Although the determinants and outcomes of CSR activities are well understood, we know little about how companies use CSR communication to manage a crisis. The few relevant CSR studies have focused on the pressure on corporations exerted by governments, customers, the media, or the public. Although investors have a significant influence on firm value, this stakeholder group has been neglected in research on CSR disclosure. Grounded in legitimacy theory and agency theory, this study uses a sample of Chinese public companies listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange to investigate CSR disclosure in response to social media criticism posted by investors. The empirical findings show that investors’ social media criticism not only motivates companies to disclose their CSR activities but also increases the substantiveness of their CSR reports, demonstrating that companies’ CSR communication in response to a crisis is substantive rather than merely symbolic. We also find that the impact of social media criticism on CSR disclosure is heterogeneous. Non-state-owned enterprises, companies in regions with high levels of environmental regulations, and companies in regions with local government concern about social issues are most likely to disclose CSR information and report substantive CSR activities. We provide an in-depth analysis of corporate CSR strategies for crisis management and show that crises initiated by investors on social media provide opportunities for corporations to improve their CSR engagement.

Corporate green innovation is an effective way to achieve energy conservation and emission reduction. Enterprises’ willingness to pursue green innovation is increasingly affected by external factors. By using a quasi-natural experiment of China’s Stock Connect program, we investigate the impact of stock market liberalization on corporate green innovation. We find that stock market liberalization increases enterprises’ green innovation, especially for state-owned enterprises. We also find that stock market liberalization plays a stronger role in promoting the green invention patents of enterprises whose managers have overseas experience and enterprises in areas with a higher degree of openness. Our mechanism analysis suggests that stock market liberalization attracts the attention of securities analysts and increases managers’ focus on environmental protection, thereby promoting corporate green innovation. Our findings show that stock market liberalization plays an important role in the governance of firms’ non-financial behavior, which has important theoretical and practical implications.

According to previous studies, China’s green credit policy, which was launched in 2012, increases environment-friendly manufacturing enterprises’ loan amounts. In this paper, we focus on a redistribution mechanism among environment-friendly manufacturing firms, namely, we determine whether the effects of the green credit policy differ between small and medium-sized environment-friendly manufacturing enterprises (SMEMEs) and large environment-friendly manufacturing enterprises (LEMEs). Using a difference in difference model (DID) and a difference in difference in difference model (DDD), we find that SMEMEs obtain more loans than LEMEs due to the green credit policy. We further analyze three potential foundations of this redistribution mechanism: information asymmetry, financial development, and government environmental investment. The results demonstrate that the redistribution effect occurs in both low and high information asymmetry conditions but only in regions with satisfactory financial development and with lower government environmental investment. Our findings enrich the literature on green credit, sustainable finance, and small finance, and they provide references for enterprises, banks, and governments.

In recent years, more and more research has focused on the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on business activities. Due to the existence of two different theoretical perspectives, shareholder value theory and managerial opportunism theory, the research on CSR has reached different conclusions. Meanwhile, the motivations for environmental investments in enterprises have received attention from scholars. However, there is a lack of empirical research on the relationship between CSR and environmental investment. Therefore, this study conducts a regression analysis on the external evaluation of CSR and enterprises’ environmental investment using data from Chinese listed companies. The empirical results show a significant positive relationship between the external evaluation of CSR and enterprises’ environmental investment. The mediating tests conducted based on information transmission and resource acquisition mechanisms explain the reasons for this promotion effect, supporting the shareholder value theory. Furthermore, our research finds that this promotion effect is more significant in non-state-owned enterprises, enterprises receiving fewer environmental subsidies, enterprises disclosing environmental philosophies, and enterprises identified as key pollution-monitoring units in reports. The research findings of this study are meaningful for clarifying the economic consequences of CSR and provide practical evidence for Chinese enterprises to understand the importance of environmental investment and the government’s advocacy for enterprises to proactively engage in environmental investment.