An Empirical Study On External Governance,Environmental Information Disclosure And Financing Cost

As environmental issue become increasingly prominent,the Chinese government and people pay more and more attention to the performance of enterprise environment.Also,the enterprises are facing enormous pressure on external governance.Environmental information disclosure is an important way to master the situation of enterprise environmental management,which has been highly regarded by government,creditors,stockholders and other stakeholders.Considering the specificity of agricultural industry,the environmental information disclosed by listed agricultural companies are closely related to the enterprise value,it also becomes the important influencing factors of investors' decision-making and financing cost in companies.So,what is the impact of external governance on environmental information disclosure by listed agricultural companies? How does the environmental information disclosed by enterprises influence the financing cost? What's the impact of the condition change of external governance on the relationship between corporate environmental information disclosure and financing cost? By solving these problems,the motivation of corporate environmental information disclosure can be thoroughly understood from two aspects: the external governance pressure and the internal economic interests.What's more,the level of corporate environmental information disclosure would be greatly improved and the relative policy suggestions would be easily formulated.Based on legitimacy theory,stakeholder theory and asymmetric information theory,using the data of A-share listed agricultural companies during 2011-2015,the external governance were divided into 4 dimensions from the perspective of social governance and government governance,such as medium supervision level,competition level in industry,government environmental subsidies and government regulatory level.At the same time,the corporate environmental information disclosure were divided into two types: monetary environmental information disclosure and non monetary environmental information.Through literature and empirical research,the effect of external governance on corporate environmental information were analyzed,the relationship between the level of environmental information disclosure and financing cost were examined,the moderating effect of external governance on the relationship between environmental information disclosure and financing cost were further discussed.The following conclusions were obtained:(1)External governance played a significant role in promoting the corporate environmental information disclosure.The medium supervision level,government environmental subsidies and government regulatory level had positive effect on the comprehensive level of environmental information disclosure.The competition level in industry,governance environmental subsidies and government regulatory level played a significant role in promoting the level of monetary environmental information disclosure.Non monetary environmental information disclosure was mainly affected by government environmental subsidies.(2)The level of monetary environmental information disclosure had a negative effect on the cost of equity capital.The comprehensive level of environmental information disclosure,the level of monetary and non monetary environmental information disclosure had no significant effect on debt financing cost.Also,the comprehensive level of environmental information and the level of non monetary environmental information disclosure had no significant effect on the cost of equity capital.And the improvement of the level of monetary environmental information disclosure significantly reduced the cost of equity capital.(3)The external governance had a significant moderating effect on the relationship between the level of monetary environmental information disclosure and the cost of equity capital.The competition level in industry,government environmental subsidies and the government regulatory level had a significant moderating effect on the relationship between the level of monetary environmental information disclosure and the cost of equity capital.Besides,the more intense the competition in industry is,the more timely the government environmental subsides in place will be.The more strict government regulation had a stronger negative impact of the level of monetary environmental information disclosure on the cost of equity capital.The innovation of this paper lies in taking the listed agricultural companies as the research object and analyzing the motivation of corporate environmental information disclosure from two aspects: the external governance pressure and the internal economic interests.The relationship between the external governance,the level of environmental information disclosure and the financing cost were thoroughly analyzed.The impact of corporate environmental information disclosure on the financing cost in the context of different external governance were further discussed.The relevant literature about the environmental information disclosure in listed agricultural companies has been enriched own to this paper.It also has certain practical significance in improving the level of corporate environmental information disclosure.