Do subsidies crowd out transparency? Institutional pressures and climate risk disclosure in SMEs

Climate risk disclosure (CRD) in China is moving from a largely voluntary practice towards a more standardised and increasingly mandatory expectation, with the disclosure agenda expanding from large firms to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Yet, SMEs still disclose relatively little climate risk information, raising a new issue for CRD research and policy: whether government subsidies, while easing resource constraints, can unintentionally reshape the institutional forces that motivate SMEs to disclose. Grounded in neo-institutional theory, this study examines how coercive, mimetic and normative pressures influence SMEs’ CRD, and tests the moderating roles of general government subsidies and targeted environmental subsidies. Using a panel of Chinese A-share listed SMEs from 2013 to 2024, covering 1,746 firms and 7,056 firm-year observations, we measure CRD through textual analysis of annual reports using a climate risk dictionary that captures both physical and transition-related risks. The findings indicate that coercive pressure from heavily polluting industry status and mimetic pressure significantly promote SMEs’ CRD, while coercive pressure from state-owned enterprise status and normative pressure from both NGO pressure and media attention have no significant impact on CRD. The findings show that coercive and mimetic pressures are positively associated with CRD, while normative pressure is insignificant overall. Importantly, general subsidies weaken the effect of mimetic pressure, whereas environmental subsidies strengthen the effect of coercive pressure from heavily polluting industry status; NGO-related normative pressure becomes positive only among key-pollutant SMEs. The results suggest a trade-off in subsidy design, where broad subsidies may dilute peer-driven learning and disclosure incentives, whereas targeted environmental subsidies can complement regulatory pressure and improve climate risk disclosure among SMEs.