Social Responsibility, Media Attention and Financial Risk of Listed Real Estate Companies in China

Abstract

In the past two years, real estate companies have been actively exploring new development models at the policy level. For the future sustainable development of real estate companies, ESG performance can reflect the overall credit quality of companies in non-financial aspects, while the fulfillment of social responsibility is an important factor in measuring the ESG performance of companies, and therefore gradually becomes a focus of attention. In order to analyse the relationship between social responsibility fulfillment and financial risk of real estate companies, this paper proposes hypotheses based on theories such as stakeholder theory, introduces media attention into the analysis framework, and selects data of Chinese A-share real estate listed companies from 2010 to 2019 for empirical testing. It is found that the fulfillment of social responsibility by real estate companies is negatively related to financial risk, while media attention plays a negative moderating role in this regard. The findings provide empirical support for the mechanism of the impact of social responsibility fulfillment on real estate companies' financial risk and offer policy options for real estate companies to reduce their own financial risk.