City-Level Climate Policy Uncertainty and Corporate ESG Report Issuance: A Bounded Null Association in Chinese Listed Firms

Vollständiger Abstract

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The direction of the impact of climate policy uncertainty on enterprise ESG disclosure is theoretically uncertain: real option logic predicts that enterprises postpone irreversible investment, and political legitimacy logic predicts that enterprises increase disclosure to hedge policy risks. This article uses the climate policy uncertainty index of the news text covering 293 prefecture-level cities. After matching, it obtained 40069 observations of 3,955 enterprises in 239 cities from 2011 to 2022. The dependent variable is whether the enterprise issued an independent ESG or social responsibility report in that year. After controlling the fixed effect of the enterprise and the year, for every 1 standard deviation increase in the index, the probability of the report release changes by 0.15 percentage points, and the 95% confidence interval [-0.27, 0.56] percentage points, and the benchmark release rate relative to 18.39% is [-1.5%, 3.0%]. The equivalence test can reject the real coefficient outside ±0.75 percentage points at the 5% level. None of the 19 specifications in the specification curve is significant at the level of 10%. Provincial clustering, two-way clustering, wild cluster bootstrap and 1,000 permutation placebos cannot reject the zero effect. The significance of the scale interaction item changes according to the setting, which is exploratory evidence. Under the measurement and identification settings of this article, the average correlation between the uncertainty of urban climate policies and the release of enterprise ESG reports is limited to ±0.75 percentage points, which is about 4.1% of the benchmark release rate.