Correlation Research Between Environmental Information Disclosure And Financial Performance Of Chinese Listed Companies In Steel Industry

Since the party's 18 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China put forward the decision to “ecological civilization” in November 2012,ecological civilization and environmental protection have gradually entered the public's vision and become one of the key areas focused by everyone.In addition,with the severe haze weather in recent years,the public is also aware of the importance of environmental protection.The listed companies are one of the most important subjects in Chinese economy.Their commitment to environmental obligations has gradually become a popular topic.There are also some companies that were punished by the relevant department for their damage to the environment.The iron and steel industry is among the 16 heavily polluting industries listed by the Ministry of Environmental Protection of China.Therefore,with the increasing public awareness of environmental protection and the country's implementation of environmental protection policies,it is significant to study the impact of environmental disclosure on the economic efficiency of companies and factors that may affect the disclosure of environmental information,especially in iron and steel industry,one of the heavily polluting industries.This paper first analyzes the environmental information disclosure motives and returns through theoretical research.After that,it uses content analysis to construct the environmental information disclosure index of listed companies in the iron and steel industry in China,then studies the relationship with financial performance.Specifically,in the theoretical research part,this article first introduced the background,possible contributions,and significance of the research,followed by a review of the literature on environmental disclosure field and theories quoted in article.Based on the literature review and related theoretical research,this paper puts forward its own research hypothesis.From then on,empirical analysis is conducted through R 3.4.2 and 208 observation are used as research samples to find the correlation between financial performance and the index.Finally,this article gives some suggestions for relevant departments and companies.To be more specific,in the empirical process,the content analysis method is applied to construct a more comprehensive environmental information disclosure index.This article uses the five variables of return on equity,earnings per share,total asset turnover,growth rate of operating income,and total asset growth rate as the explanatory variables to reflect the financial performance of the company,and then explore the index's influence on those variables.According to the relevant research of other scholars,this paper selects leverage ratio,company size,and company listing period,the type of the owner as control variables.The empirical results show that the index not only have no negative influence on contemporaneous financial performance but also have positive influence on the performance next period.Among the five variables,ROE,EPS,operating growth rate and total asset growth rate are significant related with the disclosure index and the relationship has a time lag,which means the higher the environmental information disclosure index of the previous period,the higher the four indicators in the current period.Ultimately,we believe that in order to give a signal or meet the needs of stakeholders,companies will disclose environmental information.This paper has two main innovations.The first is the innovation of research variables.In the current study,many scholars only use a single variable to measure the financial performance of companies,such as ROE,EPS and so on.This paper selects five variables based on the characteristics companies in the iron and steel industry,which greatly improves the robustness of the conclusions.In addition,instead of selecting a single variable,this paper uses content analysis to construct a more comprehensive environmental information disclosure index,which more fully reflects the company's environmental information disclosure situation.The second is the innovation of research perspectives.This paper gives a certain explanation for the time lag from the empirical point of view.