산업집중도가 기업의 ESG 성과에 미치는 영향

This study empirically examines the effect of industry concentration, an industrial structural factor, on firms’ ESG performance using data from Korean KOSPI and KOSDAQ listed companies between 2012 and 2023. Unlike prior studies that primarily focused on firm-level internal factors, this study highlights that the structural environment of an industry can act as a crucial constraint or driver of corporate ESG activities. Industry concentration, which reflects the degree to which market share is concentrated among a few dominant firms, serves as a key indicator of both market power and competitive intensity within an industry. A higher level of industry concentration tends to ease competition, allowing firms to secure stable profits and allocate more resources to long-term ESG initiatives such as environmental investment and social responsibility programs. However, excessive concentration may weaken external stakeholder monitoring and induce symbolic or formal ESG engagement rather than substantive efforts. Accordingly, industry concentration embodies a dual nature that can exert both positive and negative influences on ESG performance, suggesting the relationship may follow a nonlinear pattern rather than a simple linear one. The empirical results show that industry concentration generally improves firms’ overall ESG performance. In particular, environmental(E) performance increases significantly with higher industry concentration, whereas the effects on social(S) and governance(G) dimensions are not statistically significant. When testing for nonlinear effects, an inverted U-shaped relationship emerges in the environmental dimension, while U-shaped relationships are found in the social and governance dimensions. These findings indicate that moderate levels of industry concentration can enhance ESG engagement, but excessive concentration may ultimately hinder such efforts. Additional analyses reveal that the effects of industry concentration on ESG performance vary across market structures and in response to external shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This study contributes to the literature by demonstrating that firms’ ESG performance is shaped not only by firm‐level characteristics but also by the structural conditions of the industries in which they operate, particularly industry concentration. Unlike prior studies that interpret the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI) primarily as a proxy for industry competition, this study conceptualizes HHI as an indicator of industry structure and examines its structural influence on ESG outcomes. The analysis further confirms that the effect of industry concentration on ESG performance is nonlinear, and identifies heterogeneous patterns across the environmental (E), social (S), and governance (G) dimensions. Moreover, the findings reveal that the impact of industry concentration varies by listing market and temporal context, suggesting that the industry structure–ESG relationship is contingent upon market- and period-specific conditions.