The Impact Of Academic Independent Directors On Corporate Environmental Responsibility

The increasing environmental problems raised widespread social concern in our country in recent years.As the direct creators of social wealth,enterprise is also the major producer of environmental pollution.A series of environmental pollution cases occurred recently raising our concerns,such as Zijin Mining Sewage Leakage Accidents,Oil Spills Accident in the Bohai Sea and Cyanobacteria Bloom Crisis in Tai Lake,thus the social public require the enterprise to perform their environmental responsibility.Since the introduction of the independent director system in our country,the academic and practice do not come to an agreement on the role of independent directors in corporate governance.Giving the imperfect condition of capital market and the absence of professional directors,listed companies prefer to hire scholars and experts as independent directors,and we call this kind of independent directors the academic independent directors.Compared with other independent directors,academic independent directors have their own unique characteristics,and the conception that "the gentleman is afraid of dying without a good reputation" becomes their impetus to fulfil supervision and suggestion duty.Thanks to the deep moral values of scholars,they pay more attention to the morality of corporate behavior when performing their duties,thus can promote enterprise to fulfil environmental responsibility.To explore the influence of academic independent directors on environmental responsibility and improve the independent director system and governance structure of listed companies,in this paper,using empirical research method,we take the data of all A-share listed companies in China from 2008 to 2013 as the research sample to analysis the effect of academic independent directors on the enterprise environmental responsibility and the effect of the internal control.The empirical results show that the academic independent directors can significantly improve corporate environmental responsibility in listed companies,giving the condition that the internal control runs effectively,the impact of academic independent directors is more significant.According to the research conclusion,we put forward solutions to improve the independent director system and the environmental performance of listed companies.