分母の幻想：企業の脱炭素化のうち、どれだけがインフレと成長によるものか？

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

🔬研究者:Provides a novel decomposition method for carbon intensity that can be applied to other datasets and sectors.

🏢実務担当者:Highlights the need to communicate the drivers of intensity improvements to avoid overstating decarbonization progress.

🏛政策担当者:Suggests that regulators should consider requiring disclosure of absolute emissions alongside intensity metrics.

Carbon intensity, emissions divided by revenue, is the headline metric of corporate decarbonization. We show that a large part of its measured improvement is the denominator, not the smokestack. Using an exact within-firm accounting identity that splits the change in carbon intensity into emissions, real revenue growth, and inflation, applied to S&P Global Trucost Scope 1 emissions and Compustat revenue for roughly 1,700 to 1,900 listed firms per window over fiscal 2014 to 2024, we find that among the roughly three-quarters of firms whose intensity fell, only about half of the decline comes from cutting emissions, a split that ranges from 47% to 59% across the windows we examine (and falls to about 22% under a broader Scope 1+2 measure), so we report several rather than the most flattering. The one component that does not move is pure inflation: across every window, rising prices account for 23% to 26% of the measured intensity improvement (a quarter at the baseline), and the share stays within 22% to 35% whether firms are weighted equally or by revenue, under the broader emissions measure, and across three price indices. Because the price level is computed from public macro data and never touches the emissions series, this finding needs no assumption about emissions-data quality. Roughly a third of the firms that "improved" their carbon intensity increased their absolute emissions. Where genuine abatement occurs, a four-channel extension for non-finance firms shows it is same-asset reduction rather than divestiture: firms grew their physical asset base while cutting emissions per asset. The illusion is concentrated. In finance, 47% of intensity-improvers emitted more and only 40% of the improvement is abatement, while transport and utilities decarbonize for real (65% abatement). The distinction also shows up in market valuations: in the cross-section, a reported intensity improvement is associated with denominator growth and not with genuine abatement, a standing feature of high-growth firms rather than a repricing, so firms that improved their ratio while emitting more are valued no differently from those that actually cut emissions. For investors and standard-setters who read intensity targets at face value, a quarter of corporate "decarbonization" is the price level and another large slice is growth.

• openaire https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.7123018first seen 2026-09-01 04:47:11 · last seen 2026-09-21 04:25:28