Research On The Moderating Effect Of Board Characteristics On The Relationship Between Internal Control Quality And Environmental Information Disclosure

In recent years, the misconduct or negligence in business management causes lots of serious environmental pollution incidents. The construction and implementation of environmental protection system attract the increasing attention both in practice and in academic research, and environmental information disclosure requirements have also been incorporated in the environmental protection laws. In 1970 s, developed countries began to establish environmental legislation, scholars also began to conduct research on environmental information disclosure with a wide range of method s. Compared with environmental information research of developed countries, research on environmental information in China is still in the initial stage of development.Based on the principal-agent theory, environment dependence theory, information asymmetry theory and the external pressure theory as the theoretical basis, this paper studies environmental information disclosure from the view of internal control, analyzes the relationship between internal control quality and environmental information disclosure, and examines the moderating effect of the board directors characteristics on the relationship. By using 200 listed companies of heavily polluting industries of SSE(Shanghai Stock Exchange) from 2010-2013 as sample, this study examines the promotion role of internal control quality on environmental information disclosure and the moderatin g effect of the board characteristics through multivariate linear regression.The theoretical analysis and empirical results show that the quality of internal control helps to promote environment information disclosure, and the proportion of board shareholding and proportion of independent directors have negative impact on the relationship betwe en internal control quality and environmental information disclosure, but the size of the board of directors, separation of the chairman and general manager have no effect on the relationship. This study provides implications regarding further optimization of the internal control system construction of heavily polluted listed companies, impovement of environmental information disclosure and the structure of the board of directors. The deficiency existing in the paper will be further explored and improved in the future research.