Property Rights, Corporate Governance And Environmental Performance

In recent years, with environmental events emerging, ecological deterioration and resource depletion, environmental problems become more and more prominent.The government, investors, media, the public social stakeholders and even enterprises began to focus on environmental issues. Under the environmental sustainability, the enterprises need carry out pollution disposal positively to improve its environmental performance which can achieve the long-term stable development.In addition to the external supervision and restraint mechanisms, can we design a set of perfect internal corporate governance mechanisms to improve the environmental performance? Enterprise environmental performance depends on the environmental attitude and the formulation and implementation of environmental strategy and these are played mainly by the shareholders of the enterprise and the board of directors.In addition, property rights influence the corporate governance structure and environmental performance. So based on the above consideration, this paper studies the influence of ownership structure and board characteristics on environmental performance and the influence in the different property rights.Firstly, this article reviews the literatures about the relationship between corporate governance and environmental performance, and expounds the relevant theories, including sustainable development theory, stakeholder theory,principal-agent theory and property rights theory. Then this paper analyses the mechanism that ownership structure and the characteristics of board of directors affect the environmental performance and the difference of corporate governance made by the property rights.Secondly, on the basis of domestic and foreign environmental performance evaluation method and environmental data availability, this research adopts the positive environmental strategy to measure environmental performance, from the four aspects of environmental concern, environmental management, investment inenvironmental protection and environmental compliance.Then, we select the data from 2010 to 2014 of chemical industry listed companies which is the part of heavy pollution industry. Through these data, we investigate that ownership structure and board characteristics have a different impact on the environmental performance in the all samples, and then test the relationship under different property rights. Regression results find that:(1) Property rights are significantly positive correlated with environmental performance, showing that state-owned holding companies play a important role on the environmental performance. Government as the controlling shareholder, have an important affect on corporate governance, including environmental management.They promote the improvement of environmental performance by influencing the environment strategy.(2) The proportion of institutional ownership is positively related to environmental performance and the relationship is more obvious in the state-owned enterprises than in the private enterprises. In the private enterprise, natural person or the family as the controlling shareholder has a strong control, this makes institutional investors weak and the effect not significant in the private enterprises.(3) Equity concentration is not significant with the environmental performance in the all samples, but it shows obvious correlation in the sub-sample test. In the state-owned enterprises, equity concentration is conducive to the improvement of environmental performance, and moderate equity dispersion is helpful to the environmental performance of private enterprises.(4) The board scale and environmental performance has a significant positive correlation in all samples. Moderate scale offers the useful suggestion about the complex environment problems and make correct strategic decision and also supervise managers effectively.(5) The independent directors proportion and environmental performance are positively related, but not significant. It shows that independent directors make no difference to the environmental performance. The reason is that the supervision function of independent director is not played very well.(6) The chairman and general manager of the two level-one is significantly positive correlated with environmental performance in the state-owned enterprises,but not obvious in the private enterprises. It can improve the efficiency in the face of the complex and uncertain environmental problem and will play a positive role for the implementation of environment responsibility in the state-owned enterprises.Finally, on the basis of theoretical analysis and empirical results, and combined with the national condition of China, we put forward some proposals to improve the environmental performance: on the one hand, improving the leading role of state-owned enterprise; supporting and fostering the development of institutional investors; optimizing the ownership structure; on the other hand, improving the size of board appropriately; perfecting the system of independent directors; promoting the joining together of two jobs according to the enterprise actual situation.