Corporate Carbon Responsibility in Indonesia and the United States: A Moral-Economy Perspective on Climate Governance, Carbon Intensity, and Economic Outcomes

Background Corporate climate responsibility is expressed through policies, governance arrangements, disclosure practices, and environmental metrics, but these signals may not align with operational carbon intensity or subsequent economic outcomes. We interpret such non-equivalence through a moral-economy lens, while institutional theory and carbon-economics research provide the organizational and economic foundations for the empirical tests. Methods We reconstructed a 2021–2025 firm-year panel from LSEG/Refinitiv and derived a comparable 2021–2024 analytical sample of 3,792 non-financial firm-year observations from 1,116 firms (250 observations from Indonesia and 3,542 from the United States). The outcome is revenue-normalized ln(1 + Scope 1 + Scope 2 intensity). Climate governance is modeled formatively through breadth, implementation-oriented governance, and coherence. Analyses use nonlinear overlap weighting, year and sector fixed effects, firm-clustered inference, Benjamini-Hochberg false-discovery-rate adjustment, temporal specifications, and robustness analyses. Results Indonesian observations show higher adjusted operational carbon intensity (β = 1.311, standard error = 0.226, p < 0.001). This estimate remains similar with finer-industry support (β = 1.244), firm-equal overlap weighting (β = 1.303), and a two-stage re-estimated-weight cluster bootstrap (bootstrap standard error = 0.249; 95% confidence interval 0.823–1.799). Governance breadth and implementation-oriented governance are positively associated with contemporaneous carbon intensity only at the 10% false-discovery-rate threshold, and neither predicts robust subsequent improvement after adjustment for current carbon intensity. No carbon main effect survives multiplicity adjustment across eight later accounting and operating outcomes; one country interaction remains for subsequent asset turnover. Conclusions Formal climate responsibility, revenue-normalized operational carbon intensity, and the accounting and operating outcomes examined here are related but non-interchangeable. Their relationships vary by context, but the design does not identify causal country effects, managerial intent, or moral character. The moral-economy interpretation treats this non-equivalence as partial alignment among formal obligation, calculative representation, material performance, and economic recognition.