The literature suggests that, given the increasing pressure to comply with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing principles, global investors as financial multinational enterprises are well positioned to foster corporate responsibility across borders and help tackle grand challenges. We add nuance to this literature by leveraging time-based agency conflict theory and institutional theory to explain why this effect should not be taken for granted and how it critically depends on the regulative, normative, and cultural–cognitive dimensions of the institutional context. Using China’s stock market liberalization programs as natural experiments that quasi-exogenously integrate emerging market firms with the global financial market, we find that these affected firms reduce the disclosure of supplier identity information - an important part of the solutions to environmental grand challenges. However, regulative, normative, and cultural–cognitive institutional support positively moderates this effect, mitigating time-based agency conflict and shifting the reevaluation of the upside and downside of voluntary supplier disclosure. We address alternative explanations of the reduction in supplier identity disclosure, such as non-ESG motivations. Our study has implications for research on stock market liberalization, corporate voluntary disclosure, and responsible investing.