Capital–Constraints–Resilience: Temporal Mediation Evidence on ESG and Industry-Relative Supply-Chain Resilience

This study investigates whether and how firms' ESG performance relates to supply chain resilience in China's A-share market. Resilience is operationalized as the negative of the three-year rolling standard deviation of profitability (Res=−sd 3y (ROA)) and is complemented by industry × year-relative variants to purge common shocks. Using 9,511 firm-year observations from 2017-2023 and two-way fixed effects with firm-clustered standard errors, the analysis reveals a positive association between lagged ESG and volatility-based resilience. Mechanism tests adopt a temporal mediation design, with financing constraints proxied by the Hadlock-Pierce (SA) index; for interpretability, results are reported for SA relaxed =−SA (higher = looser). Both Sobel diagnostics and firm-cluster bootstrap indicate a statistically significant indirect effect consistent with the capital-constraints-resilience pathway. The main results remain robust to alternative resilience and ESG metrics, clustering schemes, and firm-specific trends. Heterogeneity analyses further indicate stronger ESG-resilience associations among SOEs and larger firms, highlighting the roles of governance credibility and scale in translating financing advantages into operational stability. The study aligns construct measurement across ESG, constraints, and resilience, provides market-wide evidence on their linkage, and identifies settings in which ESG is most effectively translated into resilience advantages.