The Interrelationship Between Company Environmental Disclosure And Accounting Performance

With the increasing serious of environmental problem, the impact of environmentalinformation on decision-making is gradually obvious. External stakeholders pay moreand more attantion to corporate environmental disclosure. Studies on economic effect ofcorporate environmental disclosure have become prominent in academia at home andabroad. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of corporateenvironmental disclosure on accounting performance, through a lot of academicresearch, statistical analysis and empirical test.First, summarized the relationship between environmental information disclosureand company performance from previous research of domestic and international,combined with signal transmission theory, reputation theory and decision-makingavailability, built a dynamic model to explain the interrelationship between corporateenvironmental disclosure and accounting performance. Second, structured evaluationsystem of environmental information disclosure, in which environmental information isdivided into environmental financial information and environmental non-financialinformation. Then, we selected277listed companies of heavy polluting industries fromShanghai stock market, evaluated the level of its’ environmental information disclosedin annual and stand-alone reports, analysed the status of corporate environmentaldisclosure by the view of years, industries and disclose channels. Last, tested theinterrelationship between environmental financial information disclosure andenvironmental non-financial information disclosure by simultaneous equations modeland2SLS, examined how corporate environmental disclosure influence accountingperformance by OLS.The results are summarized below: the level of corporate environmental disclosuregradually increase, but still in a low level, and it is different in industries; annual reportand social responsibility report are mutually complementary in environmentalinformation disclosure; environmental financial information disclosure has positiveinfluence on environmental non-financial information disclosure, but the impact ofenvironmental non-financial information disclosure on environmental financialinformation disclosure is insignificant; view the heavy polluting industries as a whole,there is no significant relationship between environmental information disclosure andaccounting performance; consider industry differences, last-year’s environmentalinformation disclosure has different influences on this-year’s accounting performance among industries; the impact of enviromental information disclosure on accountingperformace is related with a industy’s mean level of enviromental informationdisclosure.Finally, based on the findings above, the paper proposes relevant countermeasuresfrom aspects of policymakers, publishers，supervisors and environmental awareness toimprove the level of corporate environmental disclosure.