Research On The Impact Of Environmental Information Disclosure Quality On Financing Costs

At present,the situation of environmental protection in our country is increasingly severe,major environmental violations of enterprises occur from time to time,and environmental governance has become the consensus of the whole society.In order to promote better performance of enterprise environmental responsibility,the government departments have issued a series of environmental information disclosure laws and regulations,but the quality of enterprise environmental information disclosure is still not high,there are many problems such as disclosure in a mere form,not in a timely and adequate manner,not to report good news.So how to promote enterprise environmental information disclosure quality into practice and academia on topics of mutual interest.In the early research on environmental information disclosure,scholars mostly focus on the social impact of environmental information disclosure,not enough emphasis on the economic impact of environmental information disclosure,however,China’s "green finance" policy internalizes the external environmental risk into the enterprise’s operating risk and financial risk,which directly affects the enterprise’s financing ability and capital cost.Therefore,in the context of a series of environmental information disclosure policies introduced in China,this paper studies the impact of environmental information disclosure quality on financing costs from the perspective of the capital market.This paper proposes four hypotheses by combing the relevant literature of environmental information disclosure quality and financing cost,using signal transmission theory,stakeholder theory,legitimacy theory and institutional theory.The research object is to create an empirical model to study the impact of environmental information disclosure quality on financing costs and the difference in impact from different perspectives.This paper takes the listed companies in China’s A-share heavy pollution industry as research objects from 2013 to 2017,and creates an empirical model to study the impact of the quality of environmental information disclosure on financing costs,the adjustment of media attention to this effect,and the differences in this effect in different regions,and provide policy recommendations for improving the quality of environmental information disclosure and reducing financing costs.The main conclusions of this paper are as follows: first,the higher the quality of environmental information disclosure,the lower the financing cost,that is,improving the quality of environmental information disclosure is conducive to reducing financing costs and this relationship still exists under different monetary policies.Second,media attention has a moderating effect on this effect,that is,the more media attention,the more positive media attention tends to be,and the more negative the impact of the quality of environmental information disclosure on financing costs.Third,there are regional differences in the impact of environmental information disclosure quality on financing cost.That is,compared with the central and western regions,the negative correlation between environmental information disclosure quality and financing cost is more significant in the eastern region.The expected contribution of this paper is as follows: first,The signal transmission theory is used to analyze the impact of environmental information disclosure quality on financing cost,and also examines the differences between the eastern region and the central and western regions,which provides good empirical evidence for studying the economic consequences of enterprise environmental information disclosure.Second,it evaluates the quality of environmental information disclosure from the three dimensions of significance,quantification and timeliness,and introduces the quantity of media attention and media attention tendency as moderating variables,enriching the empirical accounting theory and contributing to a comprehensive understanding of the role of environmental information disclosure.