Corporate biodiversity narratives and stock price synchronicity: evidence from Chinese listed firms

This paper examines the informativeness of corporate biodiversity narratives in capital markets using a sample of Chinese listed firms. We find that corporate biodiversity narratives are associated with higher stock price synchronicity, indicating weaker incorporation of firm-specific information into prices. Our main result is robust across a battery of robustness tests. Mechanism analyses show that biodiversity narratives are positively associated with analysts’ forecast errors and negatively associated with analyst report attention and negative media coverage, suggesting a weakening of external information production. Overall, biodiversity disclosure in current settings appears more compliance-driven than decision-useful, underscoring the importance of verifiable, comparable biodiversity metrics to improve market informativeness.