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The impacts of carbon emissions and voluntary carbon disclosure on firm value

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Abstract

Investors and other stakeholders are starting to pay attention to firms’ carbon emissions and carbon disclosure. This study investigated the effects of voluntary carbon disclosure information and carbon emissions on firm value from listed companies in the Shanghai and Shenzhen 300 (CSI 300) Index. We also apply the Probit model to predict the probability of voluntary carbon disclosure information. The results indicate that the increase in carbon emissions has a negative impact on firm value. The action that companies select to disclose carbon emissions has a positive impact on firm value. The effect of leverage ratio on VCDI is increasing year by year. What is more, the probability of the average size firm carbon disclosure was 30.73% in 2020. Company management needs to pay attention to the risks caused by carbon emissions and ensure the quality of carbon disclosure information, especially the authenticity and reliability of the information.

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The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Funding

The authors received funding from Shaanxi Education Department Key Research Base Project of Philosophy and Social Science (grant no. 19JZ047) and China Scholarship Council Fund (CSC: 201908610028).

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Zhao-Yong Sun participated in its design and coordination and performed the statistical analysis. Shu-Ning Wang carried out draft the manuscript. Dongdong Li is in charge of visualization, investigation, writing—review and editing. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Dongdong Li.

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Sun, ZY., Wang, SN. & Li, D. The impacts of carbon emissions and voluntary carbon disclosure on firm value. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 60189–60197 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-20006-6

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