Seeking Stability Amid Uncertainty: The Impact of Climate Policy Uncertainty on Corporate Innovation Resilience

As the global sustainability agenda and carbon neutrality goals continue to advance, climate policy has become an important governance instrument for promoting firms’ green and low-carbon transformation. Adjustments in policy timing, regulatory intensity, and enforcement arrangements may create uncertainty for firms’ long-term technological investment and their capacity to sustain this transformation. Accordingly, this study focuses on corporate innovation resilience and examines firms’ ability to maintain, adjust, and recover innovation activities amid climate policy fluctuations. Using Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share-listed firms from 2010 to 2023, this study matches firm-level data with prefecture-level climate policy uncertainty indicators based on firms’ registered locations and empirically examines the impact of climate policy uncertainty on corporate innovation resilience. The results show that climate policy uncertainty is positively associated with corporate innovation resilience. This finding remains robust after changing fixed-effect specifications, adjusting the clustering level of standard errors, excluding special-year observations, and conducting instrumental variable, entropy balancing, and placebo tests. Mechanism tests provide evidence consistent with the channels of corporate sustainable transformation, external attention pressure, and managerial sustainable governance capability. Heterogeneity analysis further shows that this positive association is more pronounced in regions with stronger environmental regulation and among firms receiving higher government environmental subsidies. At the industry level, the effect is mainly observed among heavy-polluting firms and non-high-tech firms. These results indicate that the association is stronger where sustainable transition pressure or policy support is greater. This study extends the firm-level consequences of climate policy uncertainty from innovation quantity and green innovation to the adaptive capacity of corporate innovation systems and provides evidence on how firms sustain innovation while long-term low-carbon transition goals are implemented under fluctuating climate policies.