Environmental Information Disclosure,R&D Investment And Corporate Financial Performance

With the development of the economy,environmental problems such as shortage of resources,air pollution,and degradation of ecosystems have become increasingly prominent.Adhering to ecological priorities and promoting green development has become a universal goal of the global economy.Therefore,attaching importance to environmental management has become the proper meaning for the sustainable development of modern enterprises.Enterprises disclosing environmental information can strengthen the company's crisis awareness,and force enterprises to implement self-monitoring and self-management to promote energy conservation and emission reduction;on the one hand,they can reduce the risk of uncertainty caused by information asymmetry,thereby reducing financing costs;at the same time,they can also enhance corporate reputation and enable companies to obtain more green premiums.It can be seen that environmental information disclosure can positively affect the financial performance of the enterprise from multiple paths.However,in practice,there are quite a few companies that regard environmental protection investment as only a cost or burden.They evade environmental management expenditures as much as possible,and there are problems such as dispersion and confusion of contents,and low quality of information in environmental information disclosure.The root cause of this situation is that enterprises have insufficient understanding of the economic value of environmental information disclosure.Therefore,this paper conducts empirical research on the relationship between environmental information disclosure and financial performance to enhance the enthusiasm of enterprises to fulfill environmental obligations and disclose environmental information..Based on stakeholder theory,information asymmetry theory,signal transmission theory,legality theory and social reputation theory,this paper takes the data of heavily polluting industry of Shanghai A-shares from 2013 to 2017 as the research object to test the correlation between environmental information disclosure and financial performance.This paper also innovatively introduces the agent variable of R&D investment into research,and explores the moderating effect of R&D investment in the correlation between environmental information disclosure and financial performance.The study found that environmental information disclosure will have a positive impact on financial performance.Further,after dividing the level of environmental information disclosure into the quality of environmental information disclosure and the number of environmental information disclosures,it was found that the quality of environmental information disclosure is significantly positively correlated with financial performance,while there is no significant correlation between the amount of environmental information disclosure and financial performance.R&D investment is positively related to current financial performance,and R&D investment will positively regulate the relationship between environmental information disclosure and financial performance.They indicate that listed companies should take into account environmental information disclosure and R&D investment activities and promote effective interaction and benign combination between the two in order to strengthen the positive path of environmental information disclosure to financial performance and better realize the long-term sustainable development of the company.In further research,this paper divides the sample into groups of state-owned and non-state-owned enterprises and finds that the nature of state-owned property rights will weaken the positive impact of environmental information disclosure on financial performance.In addition to exploring the correlation between environmental information disclosure and financial performance,and the correlation between R&D investment and financial performance,this paper also studies the moderating effect of R&D investment in the correlation between environmental information disclosure and financial performance.It theoretically demonstrates that there is a positive adjustment effect of R&D investment,and it has been verified by empirical methods,which has strong theoretical and practical significance for the rational arrangement of R&D direction and the content and mode of environmental information disclosure.