Words vs. wallets: environmental rhetoric–action mismatches and firm carbon intensity in the energy transition

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

🔬研究者:This paper provides robust empirical evidence on how local government policy consistency affects firm-level carbon intensity, offering a new dimension for studying environmental governance and its micro-level impacts.

🏢実務担当者:Corporate sustainability teams should monitor not only explicit regulations but also the consistency between government rhetoric and action, as gaps can create uncertainty and weaken incentives for emission reductions.

🏛政策担当者:Policymakers should ensure that policy announcements are backed by concrete actions to avoid undermining firms' abatement efforts; the paper quantifies the economic costs of inconsistency.

Introduction Against the backdrop of China’s comprehensive push toward the “dual carbon” goals, local governments are expected not only to articulate green development commitments in annual work reports, but also to translate those commitments into concrete action through environmental governance inputs. Yet policy rhetoric and governance inputs do not always move in tandem, and whether such rhetoric–action divergence affects firms’ abatement behavior remains underexplored. Methods Using matched city–firm data from China for 2008–2015, this paper employs a two-way fixed effects model to examine how divergence between local governments’ environmental rhetoric and policy action affects firms’ carbon emission intensity and through which channels. Results We find that greater rhetoric–action divergence significantly increases firms’ carbon emission intensity: a one-standard-deviation increase in the gap raises carbon emission intensity by 3.4%. Mechanism analysis shows that this effect mainly operates through three channels: weakened city-level innovation capacity, reduced investment attraction, and lower environmental regulatory intensity. Heterogeneity analysis further indicates that the effect is more pronounced for state-owned enterprises and foreign-invested firms. Reducing the rhetoric–action gap generates sizable abatement gains and remains net beneficial even after accounting for the associated fiscal costs. Discussion Overall, the paper identifies rhetoric–action consistency as a distinct and underexplored dimension of local green governance quality. Strengthening such consistency can reinforce firms’ incentives to reduce emissions and allow environmental governance to deliver positive net gains under real fiscal constraints.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.3389/fenvs.2026.1799667first seen 2026-05-15 17:08:24