Abstract: Cities and enterprises are important carriers of resource elements, and are key levers for achieving green and high-quality development. As a new engine for economic growth, the digital economy provides opportunities for green and high-quality de-velopment in cities and opportunities for promoting the green transformation of en-terprises. The existing research has demonstrated the impact of digital economy on the green and high-quality development of cities. However, most of these studies have focused on the macro or meso level, without taking into account the interactive development mode between cities and enterprises. The ESG performance of a company provides a good perspective for analyzing its impact on the city. ESG stands for environmental, social, and corporate governance, which are three key aspects of a company's sustainable development. A company's good ESG perfor-mance indicates that it performs well in areas such as environmental protection, so-cial responsibility, and corporate governance. by analyzing a company's ESG per-formance, we can understand its commitment to the city's environmental and social responsibility, as well as the rationality of its governance structure, and evaluate its impact on the city. This study, therefore, focuses on the symbiotic structure of "city-business" and examines the impact, mechanism, and heterogeneity of the de-velopment of the digital economy in cities on the ESG performance of enterprises aiming to construct a new path for green and high-quality development. Specifically, based on the resource-based theory and using financial report data from A-share listed companies in China from 2011 to 2019 and statistical data from major cities and towns, this study employs a difference-in-differences model to test the resource effect and path of the impact of the development of the digital economy in cities on the ESG performance of enterprises, using the comprehensive trial policy of the national big data experimental zone. The study employed various methods, such as parallel trend test, placebo effect, PSM-DID, and lag analysis, to examine the robustness of the findings. The results of the study are as follows: (1) The devel-opment of the digital economy in cities has a significant positive effect on the ESG performance of enterprises, and this effect varies with property rights, technological attributes, and industry pollution levels. The state-owned enterprises, non-high-tech enterprises, and non-heavy-polluting industries are more able to leverage the re-source effects brought about by the development of the city's digital economy; (2) At the city level, the development of the digital economy in cities can empower sus-tainable development of enterprises through the aggregation of digital talents and the construction of digital finance; (3) At the enterprise level, the development of the digital economy in cities can promote the digital transformation and green innovation of enterprises, thereby enhancing their ESG performance. The marginal contributions of this paper are as follows: (1) exploring the causal relationship between urban digital economy and corporate ESG performance from the perspective of digital economy; (2) interpreting the resource effect of urban digital economy on corporate ESG performance from the perspective of resource-based theory. This study places cities and enterprises within the framework of green and high-quality development. Based on theoretical analysis and empirical testing using multiple econometric methods, it provides a new path for the collaboration of cities and enterprises to achieve green and high-quality economic development.