The Impact of ESG Performance on Corporate Financing Costs：Based on the Empirical Evidence of Listed Companies in China

In recent years, with the increasing awareness of sustainable development, the ESG performance of enterprises has gradually attracted extensive attention from investors, and has a continuous impact on the long-term stable operation of enterprises. In the new stage of development, whether ESG performance can reduce the cost of corporate debt financing deserves further study. This paper takes domestic A-share listed non-financial companies with ESG ratings from 2011 to 2021 as samples to empirically study the impact of domestic corporate ESG performance on corporate debt financing costs. The empirical results show that: First, the improvement of ESG performance can effectively reduce the cost of corporate debt financing. Second, the moderating variable analysis shows that corporate transparency, CEO's academic background, and whether the company is in a recession period all have a positive moderating effect on the negative relationship between ESG performance and debt financing costs. However, the moderating effect of internal control and CEO's overseas study background on the relationship between ESG performance and debt financing cost is not significant. The innovation of this paper is that CEO characteristics (whether the CEO has overseas study background and academic background) are innovatively introduced as moderating variables, and further analysis is carried out to further analyze whether CEO characteristics play a moderating role in the relationship between ESG and debt financing costs.Key words: ESG, Corporate Debt Financing Costs, Internal Control , Corporate Transparency , CEO Characteristics