3.2.2. Independent Variable

Executive environmental protection background (EP). Referring to the idea of Hao et al. (2019) [62] that the perceptions and values of executives can be inferred from the demographic characteristics of their members, the original data on the environmental protection background of executives were obtained from the biographical information published by the CSMAR database, which includes "environment", "environmental protection", "new energy", "sustainable" in the biographical of executives. "Clean energy", "ecology", "low carbon", "sustainable", "energy saving", "green" and other keywords, were used to determine that the sample has an environmental protection background. On this basis, this study counted the number of executives with environmental protection backgrounds.

#### 3.2.3. Moderation Variables

Media attention (MA). To measure media attention, basic company statistics of news information data of sample companies were used [63]. News reports from sources other than major business publications such as China Securities Journal, Economic Observer, and Securities Times were excluded. These media outlets usually act as opinion leaders influencing other media coverage, so the sample of these publications should represent the overall coverage of a company in the media. In addition, the annual number of all news articles mentioning the company's name was counted. Finally, the total number of annual company news articles was recorded to establish this study's measure of media attention. It is worth noting that this study was followed to calculate the number of all media items related to the company.

Board independence (BI). According to Zaid et al. (2020) [64], board independence is measured by the percentage of independent directors on the overall board.
