Digital Finance and Corporate ESG Disclosure–Practice Consistency: The Roles of Corporate Digitalization and Executives’ Digital Background

In the digital era, sustainable finance is increasingly expected not only to expand financial access, but also to strengthen ESG transparency, accountability, and the alignment between corporate disclosure and actual practice. Against this backdrop, this study examines whether digital finance enhances corporate ESG disclosure–practice consistency by mitigating corporate ESG decoupling. Using Chinese A-share listed firms from 2011 to 2024 as the sample, we further investigate the moderating roles of corporate digitalization and executives’ digital background. The results show that digital finance significantly reduces corporate ESG decoupling, and this finding remains robust after alternative variable specifications, sample adjustments, stricter fixed-effects settings, and instrumental-variable estimation. Across the environmental, social, and governance dimensions, digital finance exhibits a stronger mitigating effect on social and governance decoupling. Corporate digitalization and executives’ digital background, acting as key micro-level enabling mechanisms through which regional digital finance translates into firm-level governance improvement, both significantly strengthen the mitigating effect of digital finance on corporate ESG decoupling. Further analysis shows that this effect mainly operates through easing financing constraints and reducing information asymmetry. This study contributes to the literature on sustainable finance, digital governance, and corporate sustainability by providing new evidence on how digital finance can narrow the ESG disclosure–practice gap and improve the consistency between corporate ESG disclosure and actual performance. It also offers practical implications for advancing the high-quality development of digital finance, strengthening firms’ digital capabilities, and enhancing the digital literacy of corporate executives.