AI-Driven Corporate Sustainability: Exploring the Moderating Role of External Regulation
Abstract
This paper investigates Artificial Intelligence’s (AI) systemic impact on corporate Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance. Analyzing Chinese-listed companies from 2013 to 2022, we find that AI adoption significantly promotes ESG outcomes. Both ‘soft’ regulation (investor attention) and ‘hard’ regulation (environmental regulation) significantly strengthen this contribution. Notably, investor attention exhibits a complex threshold effect: at lower levels of attention, AI adoption negatively impacts ESG performance, suggesting that firms may prioritize efficiency over sustainability in the absence of public scrutiny. The facilitative effect only emerges once investor attention surpasses a critical threshold, highlighting AI’s ‘double-edged sword’ nature. For ‘hard’ regulation, environmental regulation positively moderates AI’s impact on environmental and governance performance but lacks a similar effect on social performance. Furthermore, AI primarily drives social and governance goals in non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs), while its impact in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) is concentrated in the environmental dimension. These results underscore that AI’s transformative potential is contingent upon regulatory frameworks and ownership-specific institutional logics.
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