An Empirical Study On Influencing Factors Of Environmental Information Disclosure In China's Listed Companies

Environmental problems have become more and more serious due to the blind pursuit of economic development, so environmental protection has been put forward across the whole world, which led to the creation and development of a new branch of modern accounting—the Environmental Accounting. It is known to all that environmental accounting can play as an important tool for economic management and environmental protection. In the field of environmental accounting, environmental information disclosure is not only the first one that enters the real practice, but also one of the most basic and most important issues. In the context of increasing concern of environmental information disclosure, combining with the real situation of China, this paper, from the theoretical and empirical perspective, has systematically studied the influencing factors of environmental information disclosure of China's listed companies.Firstly, this paper analyzes the related theories of environmental information disclosure, such as Stakeholder Theory, Sustainable Development Theory, Asymmetric Information Theory, Agency Theory, Organization Legitimacy Theory and Social Responsibility Theory, which serve as the theory support for the empirical study. Then, the motivation of environmental information disclosure is thoroughly analyzed from the perspective of information demand and information supply.Based on the theory above, the research methods and findings drawn from international and national relevant literature, this paper, combined with China's realities, put forward eleven hypotheses. Then, the relationship between the eleven factors and the level of environmental information disclosure is empirically studied respectively. The eleven factors are as below: the listed company's size, profitability, debt level, the size and the independence of the board of directors, audit committee, the companies'industry type, location, and whether or not going public at more than one place, the size of the accounting firm, etc. This paper chooses 173 companies that had issued the Corporate Social Responsibility Report from the 746 listed companies of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange as samples, and empirically studies the status and the influencing factors of environmental information disclosure of China's listed companies by using the multiple linear regression method. The empirical results show that the size of the company, the size and independence of the board of directors, the audit committee, industry type, going public at more than one place and the size of the accounting firm have a great influence on the environmental information disclosure. In other words, the bigger size of the firm, the board and the accounting firm, the more independent of the board, the higher level of the environmental information disclosure.Finally, based on the empirical study, this paper proposes several policy recommendations to improve the environmental information disclosure behavior of China's listed companies: the related legal system and corporate governance structure of listed companies should be improved, the market supervision should be strengthened, the independent third party review of environmental information should be paid more attention and the environmental information open system should be set up.