A Study On Factors That Affect The Quality Of Listed Company Social Responsibility Information Disclosure In China

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a great challenge for the view of Shareholder wealth maximization. It has been recognized and accepted for a long time in the foreign countries in the past several decades, and has been the focus in the areas of research and practice. With the trend of economic globalization, CSR also promotes the theoretical research and practice in our country. National grid has released its first Corporate Social Responsibility Report in 2006. In the past few years, more and more companies release their Corporate Social Responsibility Reports. This is the reason that the author decide to study the current situation and information disclosure about CSR.The research on CSR has been very mature in foreign countries. Many scholars in China have introduced its advanced experience and outcome to us. This article was reviewed on the basis of these predecessors. The article makes a comparative analysis on corporate social responsibility theory, stakeholder theory, and theories about information disclosure, and gives an in-depth interpretation for the meaning of corporate social responsibility.Furthermore, the article analyzes main international CSR information disclosure standards and the laws & regulations about CSR in China. Specially, under the rating system of "China Corporate Social Responsibility reporting guidelines", we make a quality assessment on 81 CSR reports released by 81 listed companies which comes from China Securities 100 Index. We found that there is no significant difference between the State-owned holding company and others about the quality of CSR reports. There is a certain correlation between the length and quality of the report. These reports are generally low quality and information disclosure is not complete. There is a gap between different industries. Chemical, food and beverage, metal mining industry, have lower quality of information disclosure. The real estate, construction and finance industry, have higher quality of information disclosure.At last, the article makes more analysis about the factors which affect CSR information disclosure. The results show that the length of report has a great impact on the quality of reporting, but it does not absolute positive correlations. The size of the firm has a significantly positive impact on the quality of report, because the big company has more ability and willingness to take their social responsibilities and information disclosure. The report that comes from high-pollution industries usually has lower quality, because these companies do not want to release any negative information about their own. They do anything to cover the situation of high pollution. Based on the analysis, the article gives some suggestions, such as promoting social responsibility movement and Encouraging small and medium-sized firm to disclose CSR information; studying and making more suitable, more operational CSR information disclosure guidelines for all industries; making a distinction between mandatory disclosure and voluntary disclosure on CSR information; making a assurance on the report about reliability and compliance.