Determinants Of Environmental Information Disclosure-evidence From China

With the development of Chinese industrialization and the prosperity ofChinese economy, environmental pollution problems are gradually exposed.Meanwhile, more people are enhancing their environmental awareness andpursuing "green investment","green consumption" and "green economy" livingideas, and paying more attention to corporate environmental informationdisclosure. Although the Chinese government and companies have made someefforts to disclose the environmental information, the overall level ofenvironmental information disclosure is still relatively low. To improve thecurrent disclosure level of environmental problem is just like "drop in thebucket", and to improve the environmental information disclosure is still has along way to go.This article adopted game theory method to analyze the game relationsbetween external factors and listed companies, and the game relations betweeninternal factors and listed companies respectively, to analyze the motivation oflisted companies’ disclosure.We used the data from Shanghai A-share companies in the period of2008to2012, and analyzed the impact of four levels of corporate governance tocorporate environmental information disclosure. Combined with other factors,such as stakeholders, strategic posture, economic performance, firmcharacteristics and corporate governance of listed companies, we proposed fiveinternal determinants of corporate environmental information disclosure.Furthermore, based on the five internal determinants and the external factors,such as the level of regional economic development, social supervision, publicawareness of environmental protection and the local government investment inenvironmental protection, we analyzed the combined effects of environmentalinformation disclosure.We found that outstanding shares rate, state-holding ratio, CEO/chairmanduality, independent director ratio, scale of supervisory board, scale of boarddirectors, and public awareness of environmental protection are the significantdeterminants of Chinese listed companies’ environmental information disclosure.The effect of corporate governance on information disclosure has beenextensively studied, but few studies examined the effect on the environmentalinformation disclosure, especially in the emerging markets. Our research mademeaningful contribution in the area.