An Empirical Research On How Corporate Governance Influences Environmental Performance

Nowadays as the global environment deteriorates, coupled with the strict supervision and demands from governments, consumers, medias and environmental organizations to force enterprises to implement green transformation, enterprises though, need to expand and develop, have to face with their environmental problems.Therefore improving environmental performance gradually becomes an important way for enterprises, especially for heavily-polluted enterprises to promote competing advantages and enterprise values.In this article, firstly we give a brief introduction of the research background,research significance, research progress of corporate governance mechanism, research content and research methods. Secondly, we make a summary of related theories about corporate governance and environmental performance to lay a foundation for the research of their relations. Thirdly, by analyzing how corporate internal governance mechanism influences environmental performance and how state-owned enterprise internal governance modulate environmental performance, we put forward our theoretical model and research assumptions. Lastly, combine with international standards and domestic standards of environmental performance assessment to design the indicators of enterprise environmental performance, search for related data of listed companies and make descriptive analysis, multiple regression analysis etc, by statistical software SPSS 19.0 to validate our research assumptions. The research results show: on the respect of the board of directors' governance, the scale of the board of directors has an upside-down U-shaped relation with enterprise environment and has no significant influence on environmental performance. On the respect of executive incentives, executives' salary also has an upside-down U-shaped relation with environmental performance and fails to influence it. In addition, state-owned features help intensify the negative influences of the scale of the board of directors and executives' long-term salary on environmental performance. It can be found that there exists many deficiencies and unreasonable phenomena in corporate internal governance mechanism and enterprise environmental protection, especially for heavily-polluted state-owned listed enterprises.According to the research results, we propose some management suggestions about how to improve enterprise environmental performance from the perspectives ofcompleting the mechanism of the board of directors, building an effective executive salary mechanism and intensifying the reform of state-owned enterprises, so as to provide some references for heavily-polluted listed enterprises to promote their internal governance mechanism and to improve their enterprise environmental level.