Internal Governance, Voluntary Climate Commitments and Regulatory Quality as Drivers of Corporate Climate Risk Management: Evidence from a 43-Country Panel of Carbon-Intensive Firms

Carbon-intensive firms face growing pressure to develop strong corporate climate risk management (CCRM), yet its firm-level and country-level antecedents remain unevenly understood. Drawing on stakeholder and institutional theory, this study examines three potential antecedents of CCRM: sustainability governance, voluntary climate-membership commitments, and regulatory quality. The data cover 1295 firm-year observations across 43 countries over 2018–2022. Ordered logistic regressions are estimated with lagged independent variables, supplemented by ordered probit, two-step system GMM, sample-selection corrections (Heckman two-step and inverse probability weighting), and sub-sample robustness checks. In the main specification, sustainability governance and regulatory quality are both positively and significantly associated with CCRM; climate membership exhibits a sector-conditional association concentrated in energy and basic materials. Sub-sample analyses reveal that internal governance is the stronger correlate among non-state-owned firms, while among state-owned firms (a sub-sample heavily concentrated in Chinese SOEs), regulatory quality is the stronger correlate. The latter is framed as suggestive of context-conditional institutional substitution rather than as a universal feature of state ownership, consistent with comparative-institutional arguments that strong country-level institutions and firm-level governance can act as functional substitutes. CCRM is highly persistent, suggesting that climate risk management is best understood as a path-dependent organizational capability built incrementally over time. Firms seeking to strengthen CCRM should prioritize establishing a board-level sustainability committee with a clear climate mandate; regulators should treat regulatory-quality reform as complementary to direct climate mandates.