A Study On The Influence Of Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure On Financing Constraints

Corporate social responsibility is an important area of sociology and economics. At the same time, it attracts more and more public attention. There are two points of view toward this topic in theory:On one hand, scholars including Fombrun think that enterprises should shoulder social responsibility, as it can enhance corporate image by improving their relationship with stakeholders; on the other hand, scholars represented by Friedman object to it, because they think that corporate social responsibility, a way to maximize the interests, may cause inefficiency, and worse still, in order to enhance reputation, the manager may take part in too much activities, which causes agent cost. Since1970s, although many researchers have done lots of empirical research surveys on the topic with various theories and research methods, the conclusions by no means achieves consistently. As noted, most of present researches are based on mature capital market, and those on newly developed market are rarely seen, therefore researches toward the latter one needed to be promoted.In China, only some of listed companies are required to disclose their reports on corporate social responsibility. Due to the availability of data, it was hard to do empirical research on this subject. In September25,2006, the Shenzhen Stock Exchange promulgated and carried out "listed company social responsibility guidelines", which was the first standard made by capital market regulators for disclosure of corporate social responsibility. Since2007, more and more enterprises have released their reports. By April30,2013, there are658reports delivered by A-shared listed companies, increased by11.15%in2012. The rapid development arouses much interest of domestic scholars:the motivation of this trend, the advantage of the report and the result of related laws and regulations. In recent empirical research surveys, most scholars aim to find the factors that affect the number of report and the influence of this report on capital cost and corporate value. So the dissertation aims to find the economic result of corporate social responsibility from a brand new angle. It will help us to understand the specific route and mechanism with which the report act on the corporate value, and to test the outcome of related laws and regulations from the angle of financing constraint.Firstly, this thesis will analyze the basic theory related to the topic of this research, analyze the basic theory related to the topic of this research, then review the research about corporate social responsibility information disclosure and financing constraint, to identify the entry point of the study and theme of this thesis; secondly, associate the corporate social responsibility information with financial constraint, establish the theoretical basis of this study, and then proposes the hypotheses of this article based on the theoretical analysis; then report quality and the current level of disclosure will be introduced and the empirical model with the test of data will be established in the following part; finally, summarize the conclusions and make recommendations accordingly.This study include the following five parts:The first chapter is an introduction about the research background of the thesis, significance, and research methodology, then summarized the research innovation and contributions;The second chapter is about theoretical basis and literature review. The theoretical basis include asymmetric information theory, principal-agent theory, transaction costs theory, stakeholder theory and signaling theory. Then this chapter combed the literature of corporate social responsibility information disclosure and financing constraints, and make comments on domestic and foreign research to reveal immediate status and future direction of research and development;The third chapter is the theoretical analysis. This part introduce the concept of corporate social responsibility disclosure, the regulation of corporate social responsibility disclosure and the measurement of corporate social responsibility disclosure quality. Then, this chapter make a theoretical analysis of corporate social responsibility disclosure and financing constraints.The fourth chapter is the empirical testing and results analysis. This part introduce study sample selection, the connotation of the study variables and measurement methods, then build an empirical model of this study according to selected variables and assumptions; Then this chapter execute descriptive statistics, correlation test of the study variables and regression test of the empirical model and analyze statistical test results to testify the hypotheses, and finally conduct robustness testing for the empirical results.The fifth chapter is conclusions and future research prospects. This part summarizes the conclusions of the full-text research, and provides policy recommendations. Finally analyze the limitations of this study, and look to the future research directions.This study concluded:(1) China’s listed companies universally exist cash-cash flow sensitivity.(2) Compared to the companies of undisclosed corporate social responsibility report, the companies of disclosed corporate social responsibility report face lowers financial constraint.(3) In the companies released social responsibility report, the companies with high scores faces lower financial constraint.(4) Compared with non polluting listed companies, the social responsibility information disclosure of heavy pollution influence the quality of financial constraint of the company much more. That is to say, the improvement of social responsibility information disclosure of heavy pollution listed companies can lower the financial constraint of the company to a better degree.The contributions of this thesis are:Firstly, the empirical study at home and abroad on social responsibility information disclosure focuses on disclosure motivation as well as the relationship between the cost of capital and the value of the company, etc., this paper used data of listed companies in China from2009—2011from the angle of the listed companies’financing constraints provides the social responsibility information disclosure of listed companies empirical evidence of economic consequence, help us to understand the social responsibility information disclosure mechanism as well as the way of the impact of enterprise value of the company.Secondly, although the data of corporate social responsibility information disclosure quality come from RKS, but on the logarithmic transformation to make it more reasonable, so that we can better keep numerical ratio on the relationship with other data index. At the same time, this article from multiple dimensions to measure corporate social responsibility information disclosure quality, which enrich and complement the corporate social responsibility information disclosure system of measurement.Thirdly, the article discusses the differences between the binding influences made by information disclosure of listed companies’ social responsibilities in heavy pollution and non-heavy pollution industries through the perspective of the characteristic of the industry, and therefore gives the government theoretical support of improving the requirements of information disclosure in different industries.In addition, inadequacies of this paper are as follows:There is a certain degree of subjectivity to assess the quality of corporate social responsibility information, though the source of the data is dependable; The study just select the data from2009—2011because of availability of the data; There are many ways that corporate social responsibility disclosure influence corporate value, but the study just choose one aspects to analyze, that is to say, the future scholars can make study from other aspects.