Empirical Research On The Relationship Between Carbon Disclosure And Carbon Performance

Whether from the environment or non-environment point of view, climatechange is perhaps one of the biggest challenges the world is facing. As UNSecretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, climate change is defined by us in our time.Compared to other global challenges, such as weakening poverty, sustainingeconomic growth and ensuring peace and stability, the climate change issue is morefundamental.With the rising attention of climate change problem, more and more scholars arestudying the research issue about cooperate carbon disclosure and carbon performance.This study focus on firms’ questionnaire of2010CDP of S&P500’s and seeks torevisit the relation between carbon performance and the level of carbon disclosureanalytically and empirically.Based on social responsibility theory, information asymmetry theory, stakeholdertheory and so on, combing the research method and conclusion of former literatureand the special research background, this paper revisits relationship between carbondisclosure and carbon performance by multiple regression equation.In this paper, we employ factor analysis to divide carbon disclosure indicatorsinto four factors. We classify the factor into hard carbon disclosure and soft carbondisclosure. Then we employ multiple regression equation to examine the relationsbetween carbon performance and total carbon disclosure, soft carbon disclosure andhard carbon disclosure. In brief, our results are as follows. First, we find a positiveand significant association between carbon performance and total carbon disclosure.Second, we also find a significant association between carbon performance and hardcarbon disclosure. Third, we do not find a significant association between carbonperformance and soft carbon disclosure. Our finding is consistent to the voluntarydisclosure theory. Besides, we find a positive and significant association between thesize of the company and total carbon disclosure. And we also find a positive andsignificant association between the level of the debt and total carbon disclosure. Atlast, based on the front studies, this paper puts forward some suggestions that are ableto improve carbon disclosure and carbon performance.