A Study On Quality Evaluation And Influencing Factors Of Listing Corporation’s CSR Report

Since the1990s, the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been ofwidespread concern. Under the Economic Globalization, the rapid development ofChina’s economy has prompted the popularization of CSR. The government, capitalmarkets and other stakeholders are actively promoting corporate social responsibilityand encouraging corporate to disclosure non-financial information. As the carrier ofnon-financial information, Corporate Social Responsibility Report (CSR Report) is animportant procedure of comprehensive communication between companies andstakeholders. In recent years, the energetic efforts of governments, regulatory agenciesand trade associations caused the number of CSR Report a spurt of development in ourcountry. At the same time, scholars have done a lot of research on quality evaluation ofCSR Report. Due to the late start of social responsibility system in our country, CSRReport had not been unified and standardized, so the quality of reporting varies greatlyin different enterprises.Based on previous research, this paper defined the concept and connotation of CSR,reviewed the research of CSR Report’s content, quality evaluation and informationdisclosure. With the Stakeholder Theory, Legitimacy Theory, Principal-agent Theory,Impression Management Theory and Need-Hierarchy Theory, this paper explained themotivation of corporate publishing CSR Report. Based on theoretical analysis and theexisting literature, this paper construct the evaluation system of CSR Report, whichincluded Integrity, Industry substantial, Readability, Reliability, Comparability andBalance, as six characteristics of report quality. Then evaluated347Shanghai a-sharelisted company’s CSR Report, published in2014, finding the following problems.First, the information is not complete. There are obvious signs of selective disclosureand impression management. Secondly, ignored the special nature of the industry. Theinformation disclosure lack substantial issues with industry characteristics. Thirdly, thelack of uniform specifications makes different company’s CSR report incomparable.The fourth, toke an initiative to ignore or display the negative information, lack socialresponsibility planning, mechanism construction and other specific information. Thefifth, lack a third-party verification and the stakeholder’s feedback information. Thereliability of information is difficult to guarantee. According to the Sample Firms CSR Report’s evaluation results, this paper furtherstudied the reasons for differences of CSR reporting quality between differententerprises, and the driving factors of report disclosure. Research results show that:the scale of enterprise, nature of the industry, the actual controller of the administrativelevel, board size, the scale of supervisory board, the proportion of independentdirectors and the institutional holdings are all significantly positive related to the qualityof CSR Report. The quality of financial risk and CSR reports has a significant negativecorrelation. There is no significant correlation between the quality of profit abilityand the CSR report.The main contribution of this paper is constructed a CSR Report evaluation system,based on the research of authority. According to the SSE guidelines, made "socialcontribution per share" as a index of evaluation. The establishment of this system canhelp the enterprises to find the deficiency existing in the CSR report, and improve it. Inaddition, when study on how the properties of the enterprise impact the quality of CSRReport, this paper used "the administrative levels of actual controller" insteadof "state-owned enterprises/non state-owned enterprises" as a dummy variable for theempirical test. Then found that various levels of government requires differentperformance of CSR, the state-owned enterprises controlled by lower level ofgovernment goes near to the CSR Report’s quality of private enterprises.