Talk, not numbers: entering China's emissions trading system and the carbon content of annual reports
Description
This package reproduces every table and figure in the accompanying manuscript from one command. It contains the analysis code, the unit tests, and the constructed datasets built from 4,777 annual reports filed by 763 Chinese A-share firms for financial years 2019 to 2025. The study asks what happens to two margins of carbon reporting when a firm is brought inside China's national emissions trading system: broad carbon-related disclosure, and the itemized allowance quantities that the Ministry of Finance has required in the notes to the annual report since 2020. The identified event is the 2024 expansion of the market to steel, cement and aluminium smelting. Contents. Analysis and figure scripts under src/; unit tests under tests/; constructed datasets under out/, including page-level carbon disclosure measures under three successively stricter keyword dictionaries, the firm-year panel, the sample definition, extracted operating data, and the narrative text measures; regenerated tables and figures under out/tables/ and out/figures/; the archived policy instruments and the daily carbon market quotations under raw/. Reproduction. Create the environment from requirements.txt, then run "bash run_all.sh". The script runs the tests, rebuilds the sample and the panel, regenerates every table into out/tables/ and every figure into out/figures/, and exits with status 0. It takes a few minutes. Not included. The annual report corpus itself is approximately 18 GB and is not redistributed here. It is public and can be retrieved from CNINFO, the disclosure platform designated by the China Securities Regulatory Commission; the retrieval script is included as src/fetch_reports.py. The extraction products that the regressions depend on are archived in this package, so all reported results reproduce without downloading the corpus. Sources. Annual reports from CNINFO. Institutional parameters from documents published by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment and the Ministry of Finance, archived under raw/policy/. Daily national carbon market quotations from the Shanghai Environment and Energy Exchange. Financial statement items and year-end market data from the statements filed with the annual reports. No commercial database was used at any stage. Note on language. Keyword strings inside the code remain in Chinese because they are the patterns matched against the source documents. Comments, docstrings and documentation are in English. Company and sector names inside the data files are in Chinese because that is how they appear in the source filings.
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Institutions
- Xi'an Peihua UniversityShaanxi, Xi'an