Inhibition Mechanisms of Corporate Greenwashing: Evidence from Chinese A-Share Listed Companies during Digital Transformation
Description
This dataset is employed to investigate the impact of corporate digital transformation on greenwashing behavior and its underlying mechanisms. It comprises data from Chinese A-share listed companies spanning the period from 2012 to 2022. After excluding ST/*ST firms and financial institutions, and addressing missing values, the final sample consists of 8,110 valid firm-year observations. The raw data are drawn from multiple sources: ESG scores are obtained from Bloomberg and the HuaZheng Database; financial and corporate governance indicators are sourced from the CNRDS Database; provincial GDP per capita is collected from the China Statistical Yearbooks; and the digital transformation indicator is constructed based on the frequency of keywords related to five categories of digital technologies—such as artificial intelligence—extracted from annual reports using Python. When using this dataset, it is recommended to control for year and industry fixed effects and address potential outliers. Additionally, attention should be paid to the inherent subjectivity in constructing the greenwashing measure and the potential presentational bias associated with text-based analysis. Future research could benefit from cross-validating the findings with actual corporate digital investment data.