An Empirical Study On Environmental Information Disclosure And Determinant Factors Of Those Information Of Listed Companies

In the 30-years development of China with the reform and opening up policy, the country is speeding up the process of industrialization and the economy has been highly developed. Meanwhile, the low efficient way used in the economic growth has also brought serious environmental problems. More and more stakeholders pay attention to the environmental impact of corporates'activities and related information disclosure. Recent years, the Chinese government has issued a lot of regulations of the environmental protection, and the shareholders, the creditors, and the public feel that protecting our environment and reducing the pollution are very important for the sustainable development of a society. Thus, listed companies face more pressure from all stakeholders about their environmental performance and environmental information disclosure than before. So what kind of environmental information is reported by listed companies now; whether the quality of environmental information meets the requirements of financial report? Which factors will affect the action of disclosing environmental information? Those are problems researched by this paper.First, the paper provides an overview of disclosure literature, and then summarizes the theory of environmental disclosure and determinant factors of environmental informantion disclosure. Based on Chinese background, this paper uses the legitimacy theory and the stakeholder theory as the theoretical basis for building the analytical framework, and also describes the law and regulations of environmental protection in the third chaper.Second, this paper gives an empirical observation on Chinese listed companies and analyzes environmental information disclosure level of those companies by content analysis method. The results are as follows: after the new regulation of environmental information disclosure was issued, the number of listed companies which disclosed the social responsibility report in 2008 increased significantly, with a proportion of 42.15%. The average level of environmental information disclosure increased from 2.5 in 2007 to 5.0 in 2008. Then, combined with Chinese special background, this paper creates an analysis framework of determinant factors under the stakeholder theory, proposes three research hypotheses, and uses the linear regression model to test the impact of factors such as, regulatory pressure from the government, the power of shareholders and creditors, and other variables. The results show that: industry type is a significant positive correlation; percent of share of firm i possessed by top 10 shareholders and the ratio of debt have a weakly negative relationship with the level of environmental information disclosure; Among the control variables, firm size has a significant positive impact on environmental information disclosure; environment information disclosure level has a negative relationship with company location; ROE and AGE are negatively correlated with environment information disclosure level, but not significantly.Finally, based on the findings of above several chapters, this paper gives suggestions from improving the laws and regulations about environmental protection to strengthen the role of government guidance and supervision, enhancing the power of shareholders, creditors and other stakeholders, establishing the evaluation system of environmental performance and unifying the content and format of environmental disclosure, and establishing the third-party rating agencies of environmental performance, in order to improve to environmental disclosure of Chinese listed companies.