Environmental Information Disclosure Quality,Investor Confidence And Equity Financing Costs

As China's economy continues to accelerate its development,environmental problems become more and more prominent.Enterprises will sacrifice the environment for their own short-term interests and do not consider long-term environmental costs in the production and operation process.This leads to more and more arduous environmental challenges facing China.Therefore,the information related to the environment within the enterprise has become the content of more concern.Moreover,due to the current social demand for environmental protection,enterprises are also competing in environmental protection.Environmental competitive advantage will become an important advantage in the future.Therefore,it is of special significance to study environmental information disclosure.At present,there are many researches on the influencing factors of environmental information disclosure in academic circles.At the same time,they try to promote environmental information disclosure from the angle of influencing factors so as to improve the ecological environment.However,this angle is often passive and enterprises are constrained to make mandatory disclosure,which is difficult to achieve better results.The study from its economic consequences is to actively induce enterprises to actively disclose environmental information.This paper chooses the equity financing cost closely related to enterprise operation as the impact object of environmental information disclosure.In the study,firstly,the variables to be studied,such as the quality of environmental information disclosure,investor confidence and cost of equity financing,are defined conceptually.Then,the signal transmission theory,market Effective theory,information asymmetry theory and stakeholder theory are selected as the theoretical basis.Combined with the research of relevant literature,the interaction mechanism between variables is clarified.Finally,assumptions are put forward to explore the relationship between the quality of environmental information disclosure and the cost of equity financing of enterprises.Due to the nature of heavily polluting industries,their operating conditions are significantly affected by the environmental protection situation.Therefore,it is more meaningful to study the disclosure of environmental information in heavily polluting industries.Therefore,this paper selects 398 listed companies in heavily polluting industries that have disclosed environmental information for 5 consecutive years from 2012 to 2016 as research samples.Taking the quality of environmental information disclosure as the independent variable,the cost of corporate equity financing as the dependent variable,and introducing investor sentiment as the intermediary variable,this paper constructs an empirical model to specifically study the mechanism of the three variables.At the same time,it is considered that the economic consequences of environmental information disclosure may be affected by the environmental performance of the enterprise.In the return,according to the environmental performance of the enterprise,the enterprise is divided into two groups with good environmental performance and poor environmental performance.Discuss the relationship between the quality of environmental information disclosure and the cost of corporate equity financing under different environmental performance conditions.Through empirical research,the main conclusions are as follows:(1)The relationship between the quality of environmental information disclosure and the cost of corporate equity financing is regulated by corporate environmental performance.For enterprises with good environmental performance,the improvement of environmental information disclosure quality will reduce the cost of equity financing.However,for enterprises with poor environmental performance,the improvement of the quality of environmental information disclosure will increase the cost of equity financing.(2)It is proved that investor confidence is significantly negatively related to the cost of corporate equity financing.At the same time,investor confidence also plays an intermediary role between the quality of environmental information disclosure and the cost of corporate equity financing.The introduction of this variable proves that human psychological factors play an important role in the economic consequences of information transmission.Finally,according to the conclusions of the empirical analysis,relevant suggestions are put forward from the perspectives of government supervision,enterprise self-discipline and investor supervision,which is helpful to promote the construction of environmental protection.