The Impact of Carbon Risk Awareness on Investment Efficiency in Carbon-intensive Enterprises: A Dual-driven Mechanism Based on External Financing and Internal Governance

Zhang Chen; Wang Rongrui; Wang Yaqing; Zhang Chao

doi:doi:10.16538/j.cnki.jsufe.2026.05.005

Summary

The mandatory expansion of the national carbon market and the implementation of dual carbon control policies have brought high-energy-consuming industries such as power generation and steel into the regulatory scope. These rigid constraints have reshaped the business environment of carbon-intensive enterprises, where regulative, normative, and cognitive institutional pressures jointly form the external constraint system for enterprises. Against this backdrop, carbon risk awareness serves as a critical measure for enterprises to cut carbon compliance costs, coordinate strategic resources, and increase returns on green investment. Based on institutional theory, this paper constructs a dual-driven path of external financing and internal governance to clarify the internal mechanism through which carbon risk awareness improves corporate investment efficiency. In this paper, A-share listed companies in carbon-intensive industries from 2012 to 2024 are selected as research samples. Based on the texts of corporate social responsibility reports, textual analysis is adopted to divide carbon risk awareness into three dimensions: supervision, reputation, and competition. After extracting relevant keywords and calculating word frequency, the TF-IDF weighting method is used to quantify the level of carbon risk awareness. The results show that carbon risk awareness significantly boosts corporate investment efficiency via two mediating paths. First, it effectively alleviates external financing constraints by reducing information asymmetry and expanding green financing channels. Second, it drives enterprises to restructure internal governance systems and optimize control procedures for green investment in order to strengthen internal governance efficiency. Sub-dimensional regression results demonstrate that carbon supervision risk awareness and carbon reputation risk awareness exert significant positive effects, while carbon competition risk awareness shows no obvious impact. Heterogeneity analysis verifies that this effect is more prominent in enterprises without senior executives with environmental backgrounds, those with a high degree of green transformation, and those suffering from over-investment. From the perspectives of institutional pressure and corporate strategic response, this paper fully reveals the underlying logic of capital allocation optimization driven by carbon risk awareness in carbon-intensive enterprises, expands the micro empirical system of institutional theory under the low-carbon transition context, and provides theoretical basis and empirical support for the optimization of carbon market policies and the rational green investment of high-carbon enterprises.