Hard or Soft Carbon Transparency? Carbon Disclosure and Green Invention Patenting in Chinese Listed Firms

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Highlights the need to disaggregate disclosure into hard/soft components when studying the real effects of carbon transparency.

🏢実務担当者:Suggests that investing in quantitative, verifiable carbon disclosure (Scope 1,2,3 data) may spur green innovation more than narrative reporting.

🏛政策担当者:Indicates that disclosure regulations should emphasize measurable and auditable carbon data to incentivize green R&D.

Corporate carbon reporting differs not only in its overall extent but also in the informational content and verifiability of the disclosed items. This study examines the relationship between carbon information disclosure and green invention patenting using 44,327 firm-year observations from Chinese A-share listed firms between 2009 and 2024. Green invention patent applications are used to capture invention-oriented green innovation, while carbon disclosure is decomposed into soft and hard components according to the nature of the underlying disclosure items. The empirical analysis employs firm and year fixed-effects models, standardized coefficient comparisons, cluster bootstrap procedures, ownership interaction tests, and a series of alternative timing, sample, and measurement specifications. The results show that greater lagged carbon information disclosure is positively associated with subsequent green invention patenting. Both soft and hard disclosure are positively associated with green invention patenting, but formal coefficient comparisons indicate that the association is significantly stronger for hard disclosure. Further decomposition shows that governance-, risk-, and strategy-oriented soft disclosure remains positively associated with green invention patenting, whereas carbon-target disclosure alone is not statistically significant. Additional evidence indicates that the hard-disclosure share varies systematically across ownership types, pollution-intensive industries, and provinces. The SA-index results are consistent with a potential financing-constraint channel, although this evidence remains suggestive because the research design is observational and alternative financing-constraint measures do not produce fully consistent results. The positive association between carbon disclosure and green invention patenting is also more pronounced among state-owned enterprises and remains stable across multiple robustness specifications. These findings highlight the importance of disclosure composition and suggest that quantitative, measurable, and externally verifiable carbon information is more strongly associated with green invention patenting than commitment-oriented reporting.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.3390/su18157571first seen 2026-07-29 05:13:54