Research On The Relationship Between Environmental Information Disclosure And Enterprise Value

Since entering the 21 st century, along with the rapid growth of economy, environmental pollution and ecological damage are becoming increasingly serious, and the public also gradually realized the environmental problems. Therefore, maintaining ecological balance, protecting the environment,realizing the sustainable development of economy and environment become the consensus of the community. Enterprises as the basic unit of economic activity, obtain raw materials from the nature and discharge a large amount of waste and pollutants to the environment, so, they cannot shrug off their responsibility for environmental issues. As the listed corporations have the characteristics of typical and demonstration, this paper takes listing corporations as the research object.According to the regulators on the environmental information disclosure issued by the environmental protection departments and previous research results, this paper builds the index system of environmental information disclosure from the four dimensions of authenticity, reliability,completeness and accuracy. This paper selects 260 listed corporations of 2010 to 2014 A-share listed corporations in Shanghai stock exchange which have a total of 1300 samples as the research object.According to the social responsibility reports, environmental reports, sustainable development reports and corporate annual reports, we calculate the environmental information disclosure index(EDI) to measure the environmental information disclosure level from the perspective of both qualitative and quantitative. And this paper distinguishes between the financial and non-financial environmental information.The empirical research, enterprise value as the explained variable, environmental information disclosure level as the explanatory variable, company size, financial leverage, profitability, growth, the proportion of independent directors, the proportion of the first largest shareholder shares and state-owned as control variables, this paper applies multiple regression analysis to explore the relationships between the enterprise value and above variables. And we test the relationships between the environmental information disclosure level and the enterprise value, financial environmental information disclosure level and the enterprise value, non-financial environmental information disclosure level and the enterprise value. Finally, according to the results of the empirical analysis, and the conclusion, this paper points out the limitations of the study, and puts forward the relevant suggestions to the regulatory department of the government, listed companies, investors and other stakeholders.The results of this paper show that increasing the level of environmental information disclosure can promote the increase of enterprise value. In the overall environment information disclosure, financial environmental information disclosure can promote more increase of enterprise value compared to non-financial environmental information disclosure.