Are corporate climate efforts genuine? An empirical analysis of the climate ‘talk–walk’ hypothesis
通过分析725份企业可持续发展报告，检验企业气候承诺（说）是否转化为实际减排行动（做），发现部分承诺真实，但很多只是漂绿，其中运营改进的谈论能预测绩效提升，而被动策略与较差绩效相关。
Abstract This study conducts machine‐aided textual analysis on 725 corporate sustainability reports and empirically tests whether climate ‘talk’ within the sampled reports translates into performance ‘walk’, proxied by changes in greenhouse gas emissions over a 10‐year period. We find mixed results for the ‘talk–walk’ hypothesis, depending on the type of talk and the associated climate change actors involved. Indeed, our empirical models show that while some climate commitments are genuine, many constitute little more than ‘greenwashing’—producing symbolic rather than substantive action. We attribute this result to false signalling of climate transitioning in order to mislead due to misaligned incentives. An unexpected positive finding of the study is that talk about operational improvements is a significant predictor of climate performance improvement. On the other hand, reactive strategies are consistent with poor climate performance. Our findings highlight the significance of corporate climate strategies other than emissions reductions in assessing the effective contribution of business to the climate transition.