中国企业ESG表现对耐心资本的影响研究

Patient capital—long-term, failure-tolerant finance oriented—is vital for radical innovation and the incubation of future industries. China’s top policies (the Third Plenum of the 20th CPC Central Committee and the 2024 Politburo meeting) repeatedly call for “expanding patient capital”, which also attracted the attention of some studies. However, mostly studies focus on the impacts, cultivation, and supply of patient capital, little focused on the key practical issue of how enterprises proactively attract patient capital from the demand side. We examine the driving effect of ESG on patient capital, the heterogeneous impacts of three ESG dimensions on two components of patient capital, using 2009–2023 A-share listed non-financial companies. The findings reveal that ESG performance significantly enlarges firm’s patient capital, with a stronger driving effect on relational debt than on stable equity. This indicates that creditors are more sensitive to information regarding ESG improvements. Furthermore, each ESG dimension demonstrates a significant driving effect on both types of patient capital, but the intensity varies: the governance (G) dimension has a far greater impact than the social (S) and environmental (E) dimensions, and the heterogeneous effect on relational debt is more prominent than stable equity. Our contributions are as follows. To the best of our knowledge, this study provides the first micro-evidence that ESG and its pillars drive not only the quantity but also the composition of patient capital from the demand side. The findings offer a theoretical bridge between supply-side policy and firm-level practice, and furnish managers with a roadmap to target specific ESG improvements that effectively attracts the desired capital mix. Our results also help policy makers to align ESG standard-setting with the national goal of expanding patient capital.