Research On The Influencing Factors And Economic Consequences Of Corporate Environmental Information Disclosure Quality

With the rapid development of economy and the acceleration of industrialization,environmental events have repeatedly sounded the alarm of human beings.The production and operation activities of corporate can not be separated from the environment,but in turn,it brings serious harm to the environment.In recent years,the harm caused by the failure of public environmental events to publish environmental information in time is particularly serious.With the increasing awareness of environmental protection of the public,it has become a consensus that corporate should fulfill their environmental obligations and undertake social responsibilities.The disclosure of environmental information is one of the important performance of corporate to actively fulfill their environmental responsibilities.Environmental information is different from general financial information,and it is easier to have information asymmetry.The purpose of environmental information disclosure is to reduce the information asymmetry between enterprises and the public,and to meet the needs of stakeholders.The introduction and research of environmental accounting in China is relatively late,and the research on environmental information disclosure is difficult to quantify.Although in recent years,the research on the corporate environmental information disclosure has gradually increased,but the quality of corporate environmental information disclosure study is still rare.In this context,based on stakeholder theory,signal transmission theory,principal-agent theory and game theory,aiming at the phenomenon of large amount and low quality of corporate environmental information disclosure in China,this paper studies how to improve the corporate environmental information disclosure quality(CEID)by taking the listed companies of heavy pollution industries in Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 2008 to 2018 as samples.Firstly,in order to clarify the current situation of CEID,the paper constructs a comprehensive evaluation model of CEID,and studies the temporal and spatial evolution characteristics of CEID of Listed Companies in heavy pollution industries in recent ten years.Then,this paper studies the impact of government policy,corporate and social pressure on the CEID by using the PSM-DID and empirical research method.And then it studies the impact of CEID on real earnings management from the perspective of economic consequences.Finally,the countermeasures and suggestions are put forward to improve the quality of environmental information disclosure of listed companies.The results of this paper show that:(1)From the analysis of the spatial and temporal evolution characteristics,the CEID shows that the overall expansion and extension from the west to the east,from the north to the south.The spatial pattern that the CEID is "high in the north and low in the south" is gradually alleviated.The corproate in the southwest and South China are also affected by the spillover effect of their eastern and northern corporates,so the disclosure quality is rising rapidly.(2)CEID is affected by government policy,corporate internal factors and social pressure.Among them,environmental information disclosure policy promotes the development of China's corporate environmental information disclosure system,improves the overall disclosure quality and improves the way of disclosure expression;Corporate size,executive education,executive tenure and ownership concentration are significantly positively correlated with the CEID.The simultaneous appointment of chairman and general manager and state-owned corporate will significantly reduce the CEID;The increase of social pressure will significantly improve the CEID.(3)There is a positive correlation between the CEID and the real earnings management,and there is a lag effect.Moreover,the relationship between CEID and real earnings management will be strengthened by executive political connection,but will be negatively regulated by executive compensation and executive scale.That is to say,by increasing executive compensation and expanding the scale of executives,it can avoid the increase of real earnings management because of the improvement of CEID.There are three innovations in this paper:(1)From the perspective of game theory,this paper analyzes the game model between internal and external stakeholders of corporate environmental information disclosure,and constructs a reasonable and effective conceptual model of CEID.(2)It is the first time to summarize the time-spatio evolution characteristics of environmental information disclosure quality of Listed Companies in heavy pollution industries in China from 2008 to 2018,which is helpful to comprehensively understand the development status of CEID.(3)Based on the theoretical demonstration and current situation evaluation,this paper uses DID method and empirical research method to deeply and systematically study the factors influencing the CEID from the perspectives of government,corporate and society,and also studies the CEID's impact on corporate real earnings management,so as to provide the basis for the realization path and policy suggestions of improving the CEID from the empirical perspective.