Does Local Confucian Culture Affect Corporate Environmental, Social, and Governance Ratings? Evidence from China
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We investigate the influence of local Confucian culture on firms’ commitment to environment, social, and governance (ESG). We hypothesize that local Confucian culture will encourage firms to increase their commitment and effort to ESG practices, as a basic idea of Confucianism is akin to the golden rule, which dictates that one must treat people fairly and well if one wishes to be treated the same manner. Using geographic distances to local Confucian temples and centers to create geographic proximity-based measures of local Confucian culture, we confirm that local Confucian culture in the vicinity of corporate headquarters is positively associated with firms’ ESG performance. Further, we hypothesize and find that the role of local Confucian culture is more prominent in state-owned firms, larger firms, firms with greater media coverage and analyst following, and in more recent years, when environmental, social, and governance practices are more relevant and receive greater attention. Our research shed light on studies evaluating the influence of local cultural norms on investment decisions within the framework of ESG.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".