Righteousness Generates Profit, Evergreen Waters Flow2
Description
This database is derived from a study examining the impact of merchant guild culture on corporate green transformation using a sample of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2011 to 2023. The research hypothesizes that merchant guild culture, as an informal institution rooted in traditional Chinese commercial practices, significantly promotes corporate green transformation through three channels: enhancing cooperative spirit, reducing agency costs, and alleviating financing constraints. Data on merchant guild culture were constructed based on the Top Ten Merchant Guilds in China and manually collected geographic coordinates, measured as the negative value of the shortest geographic distance between each firm’s registered location and the origins of the ten guilds, divided by 1,000. Corporate green transformation data were obtained from the China Research Data Service Platform (CNRDS), primarily measured by the total number of green patent applications. Financial and governance data were sourced from the CSMAR database, the marketization index from the Report on Marketization Index of China’s Provinces (2021), macroeconomic data from the China Statistical Yearbook, and social supervision indicators from the Baidu Search Index using keywords such as “smog.” The final sample comprises 34,922 firm-year observations, with all continuous variables winsorized at the 1st and 99th percentiles. Key findings include: (1) merchant guild culture significantly facilitates corporate green transformation, a result robust to various sensitivity tests; (2) cooperative spirit, agency costs, and financing constraints serve as significant partial mediators; (3) government environmental preferences, market environments, social supervision, and corporate governance structures all positively moderate the relationship between merchant guild culture and green transformation; (4) digitalization and intelligent transformation amplify the enabling role of merchant guild culture; and (5) green transformation driven by merchant guild culture ultimately contributes to firms’ long-term development and value enhancement. For data usage, it is recommended to take the natural logarithm of green transformation variables to mitigate skewness, to include industry and year fixed effects in regression analyses, and to use the provided one-period lag of the main explanatory variable to address reverse causality concerns. This data is for non-commercial academic research purposes only, and users should cite the original paper and this database.
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Institutions
- South China University of TechnologyGuangdong, Guangzhou