The Dark Side of Proactive Sustainability Assurance: Evidence on Accounting Information Quality
Description
Corporate financial data utilized in this study are retrieved from the China Stock Market & Accounting Research (CSMAR) database, while data regarding sustainability assurance are manually collected and hand-sorted from relevant corporate reports. Our primary sample comprises Chinese A-share listed companies on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges spanning the period from 2010 to 2024 to investigate the impact of sustainability assurance on accounting information quality. The initial sample is filtered based on the following standard exclusionary criteria: (1) observations with missing vital financial or non-financial data are deleted; (2) financial industry firms are excluded; and (3) firms designated as Special Treatment (ST and *ST) due to financial distress or abnormal operating conditions are removed. To mitigate the potential influence of extreme outliers, all continuous variables are winsorized at the 1st and 99th percentiles. Furthermore, as the high-dimensional fixed effects model is estimated via the reghdfe command, singletons (year-industry observations that appear only once) are systematically omitted. These screening procedures yield a final balanced panel of 40,376 firm-year observations.