Carbon Disclosure Quality, Stakeholder Accountability and Corporate New Quality Productive Forces: Evidence from Chinese Listed Firms

Whether mandatory climate disclosure is a compliance cost or a productive investment is now a central policy question. We study the quality rather than the volume of carbon disclosure and ask whether it is associated with higher new quality productive forces among Chinese listed firms. The evidence covers 1660 A-share firms over 2015–2022 (13,280 firm-year observations). The association is positive and survives firm fixed effects, so it is not driven by time-invariant firm characteristics, but it is modest: one standard deviation of disclosure quality corresponds to 3.7 per cent of a standard deviation of the outcome within firms, against 14.4 per cent across firms, and it falls to 1.4 per cent once firm-specific linear trends are absorbed. Because four research-input items carry 92.3 per cent of the index weight, the association is best described as one between disclosure quality and research-intensive productive capacity; it remains intact when those four items are removed from the index. Financing constraints and internal control transmit little in the cross-section, analyst attention transmits the largest cross-sectional share but does not survive firm fixed effects, and report-based attention transmits negatively. Neither the green-finance pilot nor institutional ownership amplifies the association once firm effects are included. We read disclosure as an accountability practice rather than an information release, and we argue that its productive return depends on whether disclosure is substantively verified. The estimates are associational: the available instruments fail the over-identification test, and the balanced panel selects on survival.