A Study On The Economic Consequences Of Environmental Information Disclosure

Since reform and opening, China’s manufacturing industry has made great achievements, but the following environmental problems are really scaring. With increasing emphasis on environmental issues, manufacturing companies have to pay attention to their own environmental management practices and environmental information disclosure status. In this context, more and more enterprises, especially manufacturing companies, disclose information on the environment, but the actual disclosure situation of environmental information is not optimistic, and its economic consequences (such as investors’behavior and enterprise value) are also unknown. According to asymmetric information theory and signaling theory, when an enterprise’s environmental information disclosure quality is not high, the stakeholders who are represented by investors can not comprehensively and clearly understand the enterprise’s environmental management situation, which affects their reasonable assessment of the value of the enterprise, causes an increase of the risk of investors’ investment, and improves financing and agency costs. Thus, the quality of enterprise’s environmental information disclosure will bring a series of economic consequences which deserve a great concern, and the research in this area is also an important value and significance.This paper uses a combination method of normative analysis and empirical analysis, taking the manufacturing companies listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange for example, to discuss the economic consequences caused by the quality of environmental information disclosure. The study of this paper proceeds from two aspects mainly, namely the impact of environmental information disclosure on institutional investors’behavior and enterprise value. First, this paper reviews the economic consequences of information disclosure, through five theories, to elaborate that enterprises’information disclosure can bring about a series of economic consequences. Secondly, it gets a literature review of existing study results about the effects that enterprise’s information disclosure has on economic consequences, and the review shows the research situation in rencent years people discuss the impact of information disclosure on investors’behavior and enterprise value. Then, this paper discuss the present situation of environmental information disclosure of Chinese manufacturing enterprises listed on Shanghai Stock Exchange in the way of statistical description, mainly from the two aspects of system standards status and environmental information disclosure practice, which provides a realistic background for the following empirical studies. In succession, on the basis of the foregoing content, this paper establishes three hypotheses followed by empirical analysis models. We select the 2008-2011 annual reports and independent environmental reports of the manufacturing companies listed on Shanghai Stock Exchange and related financial data from the Financial and Economic Information Database GTA (CSMAR), to conduct descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation analysis and multiple linear regression analysis and robustness tests. At last, we arrive at the conclusion.The results of this study show that the establishment and promulgation for system standards of China’s environmental information disclosure is gradually progressing, but the environmental information disclosure practices of Chinese manufacturing enterprises listed on Shanghai Stock Exchange although have improvd, the disclosure quality is not high; and that the disclosure quality of environmental information by China’s manufacturing companies listed on Shanghai Stock Exchange has a significant positive effect on institutional investors’ behavior and enterprise value. Finally, in accordance with the research conclusions we put forward specific proposals aiming at government regulatory agencies, the management of listed companies and investors, and note this article’s gaps and future research prospects.