Study On The Effect Of Environmental Information Disclosure On The Cost Of Debt

The introduction of environmental factors into the financial sector has become the mainstream consensus for the development of the global financial industry.In the context of green credit policy,more and more financial institutions are implementing the Equator Principles and considering environmental factors in the evaluation of loans.Environmental information voluntarily disclosed by companies in annual reports or social responsibility reports is an important source of information for investors to assess their environmental risks.Therefore,the research of environmental information disclosure is of great significance.However,the relevant research results in China are still relatively scarce,especially in terms of the impact of environmental information disclosure on corporate debt financing.This article takes the 2012-2016 data of A-share listed companies in the chemical industry as a sample.,bsed on information asymmetry theory,signal transmission theory,and stakeholder theories,uses content analysis to build an index to measure the level of environmental information disclosure,and adopts an empirical test method.Two issues were studied:First,whether the company's environmental information disclosure level can affect the cost of debt financing.Second,under the background of the implementation of the green credit policy,how effective is the policy of restricting the financing level of high-polluting enterprises?What is the correlation between the cost of debt and the level of disclosure of environmental information for companies with different financing needs?Through empirical tests,the following conclusions are drawn:(1)There is indeed a negative correlation between the cost of debt of listed companies in the chemical industry and the level of disclosure of environmental information.That is,the more detailed disclosure of corporate environmental information,the lower the cost of debt.(2)Enterprises with financing needs have a more significant and stable negative correlation between their debt financing costs and environmental information disclosure levels.This proves that green credit policies have increased the negative correlation between cost of debt and disclosure of environmental information to some extent.There is no significant correlation between the cost of debt financing and the level of disclosure of environmental information for enterprises without financing needs,which is less constrained by the green credit policy.The green credit policy effectively links corporate debt financing costs with environmental information disclosure,prompting companies seeking financing to actively disclose environmental information and improve environmental performance.The existing research on the economic consequences of environmental information disclosure focuses on the cost of equity financing.This article selects debt financing from the perspective of the financing status of Chinese companies,enriches the research on the economic consequences of environmental information disclosure.lt also uses empirical research to provide evidence to evaluate the effect of green credit policies.However,there are also deficiencies:First of all,this article takes a listed company in a single industry as a sample,which is not enough to represent environmental disclosure of listed companies in other industries;Secondly,the use of information hand-extracted in annual reports and independent reports instead of corporate environmental performance may exist deviation,and the interpretation of this article environmental information disclosure index using hand excerpts scoring method,the subjective evaluation results are relatively strong.