Corporate Environmental Information Disclosure And Investor Response

In the context of increasingly severe environmental situation and strengthened resource constraints,environmental problems have become one of the most important issues of concern in the current society.As the main part of resource consumption and pollutant emission,while focusing on its own business operation and development,enterprises should also fulfill the environmental responsibilities.The disclosure of corporate environmental information has also become one of the important factors for investors to distinguish corporate characteristics and make investment decisions.However,the amount and scale of information are expanding rapidly with the development of Internet technology.The differences in the way and content of corporate information disclosure will greatly affect investors’ analysis of information,thus exerting an important influence on the stock price fluctuation and firm value.Therefore,it is of great significance to analyze the influence of different kinds of environmental information from the perspective of investors’ attention.The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of different environmental information disclosure on investors’ response.This paper selects enterprises with environmental information disclosure behaviors in China’s capital market from 2016 to 2018 as the research sample.According to the characteristics of environmental information disclosure in the research sample,this paper classifies environmental information into different types of environmental information and different contents of environmental information.Among them,different types of environmental information are divided into positive and negative environmental information,and different contents of environmental information is further divided into environmental certification,environmental innovation,emission reduction,circular economy,energy saving economy,eco-office,pollutant emission and environmental administrative punishment.Based on this,this paper firstly adopts Fama-French five-factor model to calculate the accumulative abnormal returns of stocks during the window period.Then we apply the event research method and the multiple linear regression method to analyze the investor’s response to different information disclosure behaviors.The results show that positive environmental information disclosure can have positive response among investors,which is beneficial to the improve the firm value.However,the disclosure of negative environmental information will not attract enough attention of investors,thus not affecting the stock price.It is worth noting that investors react positively when enterprises disclose positive and negative environmental information simultaneously.In other words,the disclosure of mixed environmental information can also attract investors’ attention and promote the stock price of enterprises.Moreover,due to the reasons such as investor limited attention,investors will not have significant responses to each different content of environmental information,that is,not each content of environmental information can have a significant impact on corporate stock price.Moreover,the Fama-French threefactor model is also used to recalculate the results,and the environment-information sensitive industrial enterprises are eliminated to examine the above issues,and the results are consistent with regression results before,which verifies the robustness and reliability of the results in this paper.In view of the above conclusions,the following policy suggestions are put forward.Firstly,companies should continue to improve the information disclosure level,strengthen the disclosure of positive environmental information,and make complete disclosure of negative environmental behaviors,so as to improve the corporate image and enhance the authenticity and credibility of the environmental reports.Moreover,companies should also improve the way of information disclosure,reduce the difficulty for investors to process information,and try to enable investors to effectively obtain and analyze key information,thus improving market efficiency.Second,laws and regulations on environmental information disclosure should be formulated to restrict the environmental behaviors of listed companies.Besides,the government are supposed to carry out the disclosure requirements of enterprises’ negative environmental information and make norms and standards for the form and content of corporate environmental information disclosure according to the industry characteristics and enterprise characteristics.Furthermore,external institutions are introduced to rate the quality and level of corporate environmental information disclosure to improve the credibility of information.Last but not least,the supervision departments need to improve the policy of environmental administrative punishment,strengthen the environmental information disclosure supervision,and improve investors’ awareness of environmental protection,thereby enhancing the efficiency of the capital market in restricting enterprises’ environmental behavior.The main innovations of this paper are as follows.According to the specific characteristics of corporate information disclosure,this paper analyzes the impact of corporate environmental information disclosure on investor response by dividing environmental information into different types and different specific contents.Besides,this paper applies the event research method to measure the accumulative abnormal returns of enterprises in the window period from the perspective of investors.Moreover,this paper uses the Fama-French five-factor model to measure the stock return rate of enterprises,which makes up for the limitations of pricing models in previous literature and describes the changes of enterprise return rate more comprehensively and accurately.