守不住的“高”评级: 代际传承下家族企业ESG理性降级与策略性承诺

Chinese family firms are entering a peak period of intergenerational succession, which forces them to reconsider the foundations of long-term survival and development. At the same time, capital markets attach great emphasis on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices, and external pressures accelerate firms’ transition from voluntary adoption to mandatory compliance. These dual challenges create conflicts between inherent governance features, long-term succession goals, and short-term ESG demands. This paper finds two contrasting strategies adopted by second-generation successors: rational downgrading versus strategic commitment. Rational downgrading occurs when successors reduce non-core socioemotional wealth (SEW) dimensions to preserve essential ones under survival constraints, leading to lower ESG ratings. By contrast, strategic commitment reflects superficial efforts to maintain high ratings in response to external expectations, despite survival pressures. This paper addresses the following questions. Should successors lower ESG ratings rationally under survival constraints, or sustain them artificially under external pressure? Does “superficial compliance” crowd out innovation or create new risks? These questions are essential to determining whether family firms can avoid the intergenerational trap and achieve sustainable development. Using the SEW theory, this paper constructs a quasi-natural experiment with Chinese A-share listed family firms from 2015 to 2023 and identifies succession events to examine changes in ESG ratings, underlying mechanisms, and the role of external ESG pressures. Empirical results show that ESG ratings decline significantly after succession, especially when founders fully exit and secondgeneration heirs govern autonomously, consistent with rational adaptation to survival constraints. However, successors have to maintain higher ESG ratings under great external ESG pressures and survival constraints. The external ESG pressures refer to stricter regional environmental regulation, higher analyst coverage, more positive media ESG sentiment, and greater institutional ownership. Further analysis reveals that the high ratings are mainly compliance-driven and from low-quality ESG disclosure rather than improvements in innovation or governance. Maintaining such ratings diverts funds from R&D toward ESG activities, leads to increased equity pledging and raises control-right risks, which contradicts ESG expectations of stakeholders and undermines long-term development. This paper contributes to relevant literature on the economical outcomes of succession and the determinants of ESG ratings. First, this paper documents that downgrading of ESG ratings is a rational survival strategy and the cost of maintaining high ESG ratings under external pressure, including R&D crowding-out and rising control risks, is very high. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic study to analyze ESG rating dynamics in Chinese family firms during succession. Second, this paper enriches the SEW theory by highlighting its dual nature of “constraint” and “extension” and reveals a divergence between “superficial compliance” and underlying motives. Specifically, this paper suggests that the motivation of the positive link between extended SEW and high ESG ratings observed in existing literature may be the passive adaptation to external pressure rather than genuine longtermism, resulting in a paradox of “high ratings but low quality”. Overall, this paper challenges the conventional view that higher ESG ratings are necessarily beneficial to family firm longevity. This paper finds that sustaining high ratings during succession may not be optimal, and governance costs deserve additional attention. Family firms should pursue ESG strategies that align with their actual capacity, and balance stable control transition and sustainable innovation.