Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) concept has internal consistency with the high-quality development of China’s economy theoretically, and implementing ESG concept is an important way to achieve sustainable economic development. However, whether ESG performance can promote the high-quality development from the perspective of micro enterprises is rarely studied. Thus, we explore the impact and mechanism of ESG performance on enterprises’ high-quality development. The empirical results indicate that good ESG performance is conducive to promoting high-quality development of enterprises. Environmental performance and social performance can promote high-quality development of enterprises more than corporate governance performance. The mechanism results show that innovation input plays a medicating role between ESG performance and enterprises’ high-quality development. The additional analysis suggest that the promoting effect is more obvious in state-owned enterprises, environmentally sensitive enterprises and enterprises with less financing constraints. This study has enlightenment significance for enterprises to value ESG performance and government departments to formulate relevant policies.

The continuous improvement of transportation infrastructure is an important support for achieving high-quality development, while the high-quality characteristics of development will inevitably promote the process of economic and social sustainability. From the dual perspectives of economic transformation and people’s social livelihoods, we regard the opening of a high-speed railway (HSR) in China’s cities as a quasi-natural experiment, and utilize the difference-in-difference (DID) method to examine the impact of improved transportation infrastructure on the high-quality development of prefecture-level cities and its action mechanism. This study is the first to incorporate HSR openings and environmental regulation into the same framework, focusing on the high-quality development problem of cities. The empirical results reveal that: (1) the opening of an HSR can advance industrial structure upgrading and increase social employment level, thereby promoting the high-quality development of cities; (2) the intensity of environmental regulation is an important action mechanism that affects such relationships, but it presents two different influences on an HSR’s industrial effect and employment effect, that is, inhibition and reinforcement, respectively; and (3) urban heterogeneity tests illustrate that an HSR opening plays a more significant role in promoting the high-quality development of China’s eastern region cities and non-resource-based cities. Our findings are beneficial to improve the effectiveness and accuracy of decision-makers’ investment in transportation infrastructure as well as to facilitate the benign interaction between the national HSR policy and local environmental regulation strategies, thereby achieving the high-quality and sustainable development of urban economy and society.