Managerial Climate Attention and Income Inequality Within Enterprises: Evidence from Double/Debiased Machine Learning

Climate-related risks and low-carbon transition pressures are increasingly reshaping firms’ strategic decisions, but their internal distributional consequences remain underexplored. This question matters because changes in within-firm income inequality may influence organizational incentives, cohesion, and long-term firm sustainability. Against this background, we examine the relationship between managerial climate attention and within-firm income inequality using a sample of Chinese listed companies from 2001 to 2023. We employ a double/debiased machine learning approach to estimate this relationship. We find that greater managerial climate attention is significantly associated with higher within-firm income inequality between senior executives and ordinary employees, and that this result remains robust across a series of robustness checks. We further explore three potential channels—operational stability, internal control quality, and green innovation. The results show that managerial climate attention is significantly associated with all three channel variables, suggesting that it may be related to within-firm income distribution through firms’ operating conditions, governance arrangements, and innovation-driven organizational change. Further analysis indicates that this inequality-widening pattern is more pronounced among firms in low-pollution industries and firms with lower ownership concentration, with more suggestive evidence among firms with higher risk. This study highlights that, beyond environmental outcomes, corporate climate strategies require deliberate attention to their internal income distribution consequences and corresponding governance safeguards.