CEO characteristics, carbon disclosure and earnings management in China: the role of risk tolerance and environmental uncertainty

This study examines how earnings management shapes the relationship between CEO characteristics, i.e., gender, education, age, tenure and financial expertise, and corporate carbon disclosure. While prior research links managerial attributes to environmental transparency, limited attention has been paid to the role of financial reporting incentives and contextual contingencies in explaining heterogeneous outcomes. Drawing on a sample of Chinese listed firms, we find that earnings management significantly moderates the association between CEO characteristics and carbon disclosure, although the direction and magnitude of this effect vary across firms. We further show that firm-level risk tolerance and environmental uncertainty act as important boundary conditions. In high-risk-tolerance firms, CEO age is negatively associated with carbon disclosure, whereas female and more-educated CEOs are associated with higher disclosure levels; these relationships are not observed in low-risk-tolerance firms. Under high environmental uncertainty, female CEOs disclose more carbon information, while longer-tenured CEOs disclose less. In contrast, in low-uncertainty contexts, older CEOs disclose more, whereas CEOs with higher education and financial expertise disclose less. Our results are robust to alternative measures and sensitivity tests. Focusing on China, this study highlights the conditional role of managerial traits in environmental reporting and offers implications for governance design and disclosure oversight. Our findings should be interpreted cautiously as they are based on Chinese listed firms and CEO demographic proxies, which may limit generalisability and may not fully capture underlying managerial mechanisms.