Going green or green-washing: The impact of CBAM on Chinese firms’ strategic environmental behaviors

: The EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), designed to mitigate carbon leakage, represents a new generation of climate policy that extends carbon regulation beyond national borders by reshaping trade costs and sending low-carbon compliance signals to exporting firms. Focusing on Chinese listed firms in high-carbon industries exporting to the EU, this study employs a Difference-in-Differences (DID) approach to identify firms’ anticipatory strategic environmental responses to CBAM-related policy signals. The results show that CBAM-related policy signals significantly enhance firms’ environmental information disclosure but do not induce a corresponding increase in green innovation, resulting in a clear “disclosure–innovation decoupling.” Mechanism analysis indicates that this anticipatory effect operates through financing constraints, precautionary liquidity, and resource crowding-out. Digital transformation moderates this decoupling by improving resource allocation. Heterogeneity analyses show that non-state-owned, domestic, and non-subsidized firms are more likely to favor symbolic disclosure over green innovation. By uncovering firms’ anticipatory strategic responses to international climate policy signals, this study contributes to the literature on carbon border measures and corporate environmental behavior, providing firm-level evidence on the tension between disclosure and green innovation.