Climate Commitments, Environmental Resource Allocation, and Board Independence: Evidence from China

This study examines how the specificity of corporate climate commitments relates to environmental resource allocation and whether board independence conditions these associations. We link sustainability reports with financial, governance, and environmental data for 10,767 firm-year observations from 1864 Chinese listed firms, covering report years 2010–2022 and environmental outcomes through 2023. Commitments are classified as No Commitment, General Commitment (GC), or Quantified Commitment (QC). Firm- and year-fixed-effects models examine positive environmental expense or capitalized environmental asset records, monetary amounts, and intensities across alternative observation horizons. In the main full-sample analysis, GC is associated with a higher probability of positive environmental records, whereas QC shows no stronger association than GC. Greater board independence is associated with a more favorable QC−GC contrast. These patterns vary with data coverage and do not consistently extend to greater amounts or intensity, with some asset-based estimates showing negative associations. A sensitivity analysis using an alternative coding procedure yields statistically insignificant estimates for the GC association and the comparative moderation contrast. The study links research on climate commitments to environmental accounting by distinguishing the presence of recorded resources from their monetary scale.