**3. Data and Methodology**

#### *3.1. Data and Samples*

This paper investigated the impact of the ESG rating announcement on green innovation for the listed companies of the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchange from 2009 to 2020 as the research case. The specific case selection process was as follows: (i) exclude listed finance and insurance companies that greatly differed from other companies in terms of the main business, company size, and information disclosure in China; (ii) exclude special treatment (ST)-listed companies that greatly differed from other companies in financial indicators and information disclosure; (iii) exclude the companies listed in that year that had a shorter listing period and historical information duration, and greatly differed from other companies in information disclosure; (iv) eliminate the missing samples such as green innovation patents and control variables; (v) obtain a total of 21,616 observations. This paper employed Winsor2 to perform the tailing treatment on the continuous variables at the levels of 0.01 and 0.99 to mitigate the impact of extreme values on the empirical results. ESG rating data were collected from the Wind database and other data were from the CSMAR database. The green innovation data were derived from the patent classification number data of the China research data service platform (CNRDS) and the "International Patent Classification green list" issued in 2010 by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

#### *3.2. Variables Definition*
