The Research On Influencing Factors Of Chinese Listed Company’s Environmental Information Disclosure

BACKGROUNDThe industrial revolution, as the beginning of the modern industrial civilization, not only for the human society bring an unprecedented level of science and technology, economy and urbanization development, but also for humans bring a series of problems, such as environmental pollution, resource shortage, the population expansion and so on. The coming of the Low-Carbon Economy age requires the human development mode should be changed and the mode based on the environment polluting and resources exhausting should be abandoned. Therefore, company’s business activities are being paid close attention by the whole society. In recent years, the serious environment pollution incidents which happened in worldwide make the people’s attention reach an unprecedented height. The consciousness of the people who wants to understand the environmental performance of companies has awakened. In China’s case as examples, there was a blowout occurred in a branch company of CNPC in Kaixian of Chongqing city at2003; in late2005an explosion at a chemical plant in north-eastern Jilin province sent large of toxic benzene into the Songhua River. The cuprates water linkage of Zijin Mining Group brings about Huge ecological and property losses. These endless pollution incidents constantly stimulate public to focus and criticize for the environmental action of companies.In such circumstances, the environment information disclosure, as the most fundamental and effective communication way of the environmental performance between a company and stakeholders, naturally come into the research scope of the academic circles. The research on environmental information disclosure in foreign countries has accumulated many achievements, but in China the research is not mature. On one hand, most of the domestic research uses the experience of other countries for reference; On the other hand, the domestic research on disclosure frame, theory, practice and the comprehensiveness of influencing factors have a lot of divergence and deficiency.From the current situation of environmental information disclosure perspective, lots of problems exist. No matter the content, method, quality, etc, are unsatisfactory, and there still exists a big gap compared with the developed countries. Therefore, the environmental information disclosure research about Chinese Listing Company has theoretical and practical dual meaning.PURPOSEThere are two purpose in this paper studies:the first is, through the theoretical and empirical studies, exploring the influencing factors of the environmental information disclosure, identify the influencing degree of each factor to the environmental information disclosure, provides some strongly feasible decisions to improve the environmental information releasing about the listed companies in China; The second is that the investigation of the factor, media report, opens up a new research way for later research.MAIN CONTENTThis paper is divided into five chapters, and each chapter’s content are settled as below:Chapter1:introduction. This chapter mainly introduces the background and main topics of reality and theoretical meaning; expounds the research idea, research methods; illustrates the basic framework; describes the main contribution of this shortage and discussed.Chapter2:literature review. This chapter defines the some words about environmental information disclosure; study the theoretical and empirical research of corporate environmental information disclosure from the perspective of domestic and international.Chapter3:theoretical basis. This chapter mainly expounds the guidance of the legitimacy theory, stakeholder theory, and theory of impression management to the environmental information disclosure research; discusses the intrinsic motivation of information disclosure.Chapter4:empirical research and analysis. This chapter is the main part of the paper. Firstly it confirmed samples and research methods; designed the indexes of environmental information disclosure; analyzed the current situation of environmental information disclosure; tested the correlation and hypothesis; reached a conclusion about the relationship between three aspects, such as company characteristics, governance structure, public pressure, and environmental information disclosure; also took robustness test to ensure the reliability of empirical results.Chapter5:conclusion and countermeasures. This chapter summarized analysis above; determined the influence between corporate environmental information disclosure and company size, asset-liability ratio, ROE, ownership property, the number of media report; put forward a series of feasible countermeasures and suggestions from the macro, medium, micro three levels. Finally, the author of this paper explained limitation of this paper and the further research direction.CONCLUSIONThe conclusion is that:(1) the level of environmental information disclosure of the Chinese listed companies is still not optimistic, but a relief is its level is gradually rising.(2) The form of disclosure is more various.(3) The quality of disclosure is not high, and some substantial contents are selectively ignored.(4) There are significant positive correlations between the each factor like company size, company performance, financial leverage and environmental information disclosure level.(5) The state-holding listed companies’level of environmental information disclosure is higher than non-state-owned listed companies.(6) Public pressure has a notable positive effect to the environment information disclosure level.CONTRIBUTIONThe main contribution of this paper is in the following aspects.(1) To the disastrous environmental accidents as the breakthrough point, this paper studied the environment information disclosure. This method reflects the combination of the academic research and social hot issues.(2) This article selects the number of media reports as the alternative variable of public pressure. The method is rarely in the former research about the similar topic.(3) In this paper, the sample has adjusted and expanded. And selecting the data of2009,2010ensures the timeliness. Meanwhile, in the scope of information acquisition, this paper covers the company’s annual report, environmental responsibility report, social responsibility report and sustainable development report. These measures ensure the conclusion of this paper can be more really reflect the situation of Chinese corporate environmental information disclosure.