Greenwashing Premium or Penalty? ESG Disclosure and Corporate R&D Investment Under Financing Constraints

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-777-4_84How to use a DOI?

Keywords

ESG Disclosure; Greenwashing; R&D Investment; Cost of Equity; Signal Credibility

Abstract

This study investigates the impact and contextual boundaries of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure on corporate research and development (R&D) investment using a sample of Chinese A-share firms listed in Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Beijing from 2014 to 2024. The paper introduces a firm-level greenwashing index and measures the cost of equity to examine how disclosure affects innovation investment. The results indicate that ESG disclosure significantly increases R&D intensity, with stronger effects in non-state-owned enterprises and in firms with high levels of institutional ownership. Greenwashing behavior positively moderates this relationship, suggesting that some firms engage in a strategic “research-driven remediation” response, using R&D investments to offset their greenwashing behavior. Conversely, the cost of equity negatively moderates the effect, indicating that high financing costs constrain the translation of disclosure signals into resource commitments. By integrating the divergence between stated commitments and enacted behavior into the ESG-innovation framework, the study uncovers the nonlinear consequences of greenwashing and offers evidence to inform differentiated information disclosure regulation and the allocation of green finance resources.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Chenyi Yao
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/30
TI  - Greenwashing Premium or Penalty? ESG Disclosure and Corporate R&D Investment Under Financing Constraints
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 8th International Conference on Economic Management and Cultural Industry (ICEMCI 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 822
EP  - 834
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-777-4_84
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-777-4_84
ID  - Yao2026
ER  -