Righteousness Generates Profit, Evergreen Waters Flow: A Study on the Influence of Merchant Guild Culture on Corporate Green Transformation2

Financial and governance data were sourced from the CSMAR database, the marketization index from the Report on Marketization Index of China’s Provinces (2021), macroeconomic data from the China Statistical Yearbook, and social supervision indicators from the Baidu Search Index using keywords such as “smog.” The final sample comprises 34,922 firm-year observations, with all continuous variables winsorized at the 1st and 99th percentiles.

Key findings include: (1) merchant guild culture significantly facilitates corporate green transformation, a result robust to various sensitivity tests; (2) cooperative spirit, agency costs, and financing constraints serve as significant partial mediators; (3) government environmental preferences, market environments, social supervision, and corporate governance structures all positively moderate the relationship between merchant guild culture and green transformation; (4) digitalization and intelligent transformation amplify the enabling role of merchant guild culture; and (5) green transformation driven by merchant guild culture ultimately contributes to firms’ long-term development and value enhancement.

For data usage, it is recommended to take the natural logarithm of green transformation variables to mitigate skewness, to include industry and year fixed effects in regression analyses, and to use the provided one-period lag of the main explanatory variable to address reverse causality concerns. This data is for non-commercial academic research purposes only, and users should cite the original paper and this database.