Research On The Motivation, Influencing Factors And Economic Consequence Of Environmental Information Disclosure Of Listed Companies In Chinese Heavy Polluting Industries

While the process of China’s industrialization has been accelerating in recent years, environmental pollution incidents are also break out frequently, which have caused great impact on the ecological environment, and have caused strong social attention. The serious environmental pollution will bring China an extremely serious test to the further development of China’s economy and society! From the Party’s fifth Plenary Session of the 17 th to the third Plenary Session of the 18 th, such word as "TwoOriented Society" and "Ecological Civilization" were all treated profoundly. "Green Economy" and "Ecological Civilization" and "Beautiful China" has become a strategic direction for future development of China!Company’s undertaking corporate environmental responsibility and fulfilling environmental obligations is the preconditions to build "Two-Oriented Society" and to develop "Ecological Civilization". The purpose of environmental information disclosure is to publish enterprise’s business environment-related information to the public and to reduce the information asymmetry between enterprises and the public and to encourage enterprises to perform environmental responsibility better. Only through a reasonable institutional arrangement and an intrinsic motivation, can the enterprise disclose environmental information voluntarily to achieve full protection of the ecological environment.The disclosure of corporate environmental information, which can reflect the fulfillment of environmental responsibility, meet the strong demand of the community and other stakeholders, has become the only way to the sustainable development of modern society and the construction of "Ecological Civilization".Due to early start,US, EU and Japan and other developed market economies have set up perfect systems of relevant laws and regulations which have become wellfunctioning. Environmental accounting theory has also been developed relatively maturely in these countries. After long years of Reform and Opening, China’s emphasis on environmental issues is not enough. So the research on environmental accounting and environmental information disclosure has been lagged. As environmental issues becoming increasingly prominent, people’s environmental awareness being constantly awakening and the understanding of the nature of the enterprise being deepened, the voice that corporates should undertake corporate social responsibility(environmental responsibility) rises gradually. Based on the serious environmental pollution and the improving environmental needs of the people, Ministry of China’s Environmental Protection has issued a series of laws and regulations to promote and improve China’s corporate environmental information disclosure. However, compared with the United States and Europe, the current situation of corporate environmental information disclosure is not optimistic in China, where a relatively small number of listed companies discloses environmental information, and whose overall level of disclosure of environmental information is still very low.Listed companies in heavy polluting industries should bear the brunt of corporate environmental information disclosure. It is a good way to solve the problem of China’s environmental pollution that we first study the theory of environmental information disclosure of listed companies in heavy polluting industries clearly and urge them to do the work better and then to promote other industries and enterprises to disclose the environmental information.Against this background, taking the ecological modernization theory, stakeholder theory, organizational legitimacy theory, ecological economics theory as the theoretical foundation, using empirical analysis method, this paper select 2009-2013 China’s Ashare listed companies in polluting industries, to explore the motivations of corporate environmental information disclosure from the perspective of refinancing needs, and to find out factors that influence the quality of environmental information disclosure. And at last this paper want to examine whether the disclosure of environmental information can reduce information asymmetry.The full text can be divided into two parts as a whole. The first part is the theoretical analysis, including the contents from the first chapter to the third chapter.The second part is the empirical analysis, including chapters from the fourth to the seventh.The first chapter is the introduction of the paper. The chapter consists of four sections. Firstly, the chapter discusses the research background and significance of the research from two levels of practice and theory. Then, the chapter defines concept of a few terms used in this article: corporate environmental responsibility, heavily polluting industries, environmental information and environmental information disclosure. Thirdly, the chapter presents research methods and contents of the article. The fourth quarter of this chapter describes the possible innovation and lack of research. The possible innovation of this article is twofold. Firstly, most of the existing literature explore affecting factors from the microscopic view of corporate governance, this paper analyses the affecting factors from the micro and meso angles, which includes corporate governance and product market competition. Secondly, few of the existing literature has explore the economic consequences of corporate environmental information disclosure from the perspectives of analyst earnings forecasts and financial constraints, this article has explored the field from a new way. The lack of research in this paper are: the data used in this paper directly comes from “Rankins CSR Ratings”. The reliability of the data in this paper is not verified. There are many factors that influence the level of enterprise environmental information disclosure, including subjective factors and objective factors. This paper tries to separate the subjective factors and objective factors and defines the subjective factors as "motivation", the objective factors as "impact factor".The rationality of this distinction remains to be verified.In the paper the the model design of empirical analysis is relatively simple.The second chapter reviews the foreign and domestic literatures about the motives and influence factors and economic consequences of the environmental information disclosure. The existing research literatures in this area have been fruitful. But most of the current domestic researchs just choose one or two years of data from only one or two industries as the research sample, the sample size is often not very abundant, so the popularity of the research conclusions is limited. Secondly, no one has research the problem systematically, this paper researches on the heavily polluting industries systematically.The third chapter is the institutional background and theoretical basis. Firstly the paper elaborates the generation and development of the corporate environmental information disclosure system in United States, European Union and Japan; then it introduces development process of China’s corporate environmental information system. Finally, the article elaborates the theories includes ecological modernization theory, organizational legitimacy theory, ecological economics theory.The fourth chapter researchs the motivation of corporate environmental disclosure. The paper analyses relationship between the quality of environmental information disclosure and refinancing needs. The empirical results show that:(1) there is a refinancing needs of environmental information disclosure. The quality is significantly higher in companies which have refinancing needs than those have no refinancing needs;(2) the positive correlation between refinancing needs and the quality of environmental information is more obvious in the eastern region than in the western region;(3) the positive correlation between refinancing needs and the quality of environmental information is more obvious in the private enterprises than in the stateowned enterprises. The findings show that:(1) capital market motivation exists in the environmental information disclosure in listed companies of heavy pollution industries;(2) the "state" nature of companies bring "negative" impact on the capital market motivation of environmental information disclosure;(3) promoting market process is the fundamental methods to improve the quality of corporate environmental information disclosure.The fifth chapter analyzes the factors affecting the quality of corporate environmental disclosure. The first section of this article uses game theory, constructing "government- enterprise", "Enterprise- Enterprise" and "big business- small business" game model, to analyze the behavior of governments and businesses during the disclosure of environment information. After analysis we found: supervision of government departments is an important factor affecting corporate environmental information disclosure! This discovery provides a useful insight: in the process of building and promoting corporate environmental information disclosure system, the government cannot been "absence". Governmental regulation plays an important and indispensable role in the whole process. Government regulators should fulfill the duties, should not “be vacant”, and take the necessary interventions to create an atmosphere to encourage the disclosure of environmental information, and then urge enterprises to improve their environmental performance.The second part of this chapter select 1044 samples to empirical test the relationship between the product market competition, corporate governance and environmental disclosure. The research results show that: the overall level environmental information disclosure of listed companies of China’s in heavily polluting industries is not high. And large differences exist in different companies. The level of environmental information disclosure in eastern China is significantly higher than those in the western region; Reasonable arrangements of corporate governance can help to improve the levels of environmental information disclosure. Different governance mechanisms has different effects on the levels of environmental information disclosure.The sixth chapter is the study of the economic consequences of corporate environmental information disclosure. The paper researches the problem from two perspectives, financing constraints and accuracy of analysts predict, to test whether corporate environmental information disclosure can reduce the information asymmetry and provide useful information to investors? The results show that:A significant negative correlation between the degree of financing constraints and the quality of corporate environmental information disclosure indicates that environmental information has important reference value in the capital market. The negative correlation is more significant in eastern companies and in less competitive industries.A significant positive correlation between the accuracy of analyst earnings forecasts and the quality of corporate environmental information disclosure indicates that environmental information can help to improve the accuracy of analyst earnings forecasts. The positive correlation is more significant in eastern companies and in stateowned companies.The seventh chapter summarizes the whole paper, putting forward the research findings and policy recommendations. This paper presents the following recommendations:(1) to raise the company’s awareness of environmental responsibility and the ethical standards of environment; and(2) to develop and improve laws and regulations of corporate environmental information disclosure; and(3) to promote environmental accounting research;(4) to strengthen the external constraints, and to improve the regulatory mechanism of environmental information disclosure.