Guojun He | The Demand, Supply, and Market Responses of Corporate ESG Actions: Evidence from a Nationwide Experiment in China
Guojun He | The Demand, Supply, and Market Responses of Corporate ESG Actions: Evidence from a Nationwide Experiment in China
Friday, October 16, 202612:00 PM - 1:20 PM (Pacific)
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall
SCCEI Seminar Series (Fall 2026)
Friday, October 16, 2026 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way
The Demand, Supply, and Market Responses of Corporate ESG Actions: Evidence from a Nationwide Experiment in China
We conduct a nationwide field experiment on over 4,800 Chinese listed firms to study how investor ESG demand shapes corporate behavior and valuations. We randomly raise ESG concerns on public investor platforms, generating publicly observable firm-level demand shocks. Treated firms answer at length, issue more ESG reports, discuss ESG with institutional investors, and modestly improve environmental performance. Average valuations do not change, while environmental inquiries show slightly positive price patterns. Responses concentrate among productive, opaque firms, which fund ESG in part by reducing advertising expenditure. The evidence is consistent with ESG serving as a costly signal under information frictions.
About the Speaker
Guojun He is an economist working on environmental, development, and governance issues. Currently, he is a professor in Economics at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). He serves as the director of HKU’s ESG Research Institute and the associate director of HKU’s Institute of China Economy. He holds a concurrent appointment at the Energy Policy Institute of the University of Chicago (EPIC) and leads research activities of its China center (EPIC-China).
He’s research tries to address some of the most challenging problems faced by developing countries and seeks to produce empirically grounded estimates for optimal policy design. The majority of his work focuses on understanding the benefits and costs of environmental policies, while he also has a broader research interest in development and governance issues.
He has won multiple academic awards, including the Zhang Pei-Gang Award for Outstanding Achievement in Development Economics (the highest award in China for development economics research) and the Gregory Chow Best Paper Award from the Chinese Economists Society. In addition, He is also a Fellow of the Asian Bureau of Financial Economic Research, an external research affiliate of the Institute of Sustainable and Green Finance at the National University of Singapore, a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago, and a consultant to the Asian Development Bank, CICC Research Institute and other institutions.