This study explores the following two aspects: (i) the impact of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) scores and corporate ownership characteristics on the performance of Chinese listed companies, and (ii) whether different ownership characteristics (state-owned, private, foreign) moderate the relationship between ESG participation and corporate performance. By analyzing a comprehensive sample of 4649 listed companies in China, we provide robust evidence that ESG participation and its three pillars (i.e., Environmental, Social, and Governance) can significantly enhance corporate performance, as measured by the accounting-based proxy return on assets (ROA). Moreover, our research findings reveal an important and novel discovery: in the Chinese market, ownership types have significantly different moderating effects on the relationship between ESG and corporate performance. Specifically, compared to state-owned enterprises and private corporations, foreign ownership exhibits a stronger moderating effect in enhancing the positive impact of ESG on ROA, followed by private corporations, while the moderating effect of state-owned enterprises is the weakest. This result provides new perspectives and empirical support on how ESG and ownership structure jointly affect corporate performance, offering references for future related research and policy formulation.

We primarily investigate institutional investors (proxied by mutual fund analysts) in terms of their information search behavior, trading activities, and fund performance. In this paper, we exploit the manually collected conference calls dataset to explore the topic information that investors are interested in. Specifically, based on questions asked by mutual fund analysts during conference calls, we employ a combination of text analysis models such as LDA topic modeling, Word2Vec, and GPT-3.5 to quantify mutual fund information search behavior systematically. We find that institutional investors are primarily interested in information related to number, information timing, financials, company operations, market competition, and 12 other topics. While mutual funds consistently focus on the 16 topics, the extent to which they request related information and whether it influences their portfolio holdings shows considerable variance. On average, mutual funds' attention to the topics of region, operation, R&D, and market competition significantly impacts fund holding behavior. Regression analysis indicates that if a fund adjusts its holdings based on these four categories of topics, it can significantly improve the fund's stock-level returns in the following month.