Social Responsibility Supervision System And Corporate Environmental Information Disclosure: Empirical Evidence From The Social Responsibility Guidelines In China

In recent years,environmental protection has gradually attracted a lot of attention in China.In order to strengthen the supervision and control on environmental pollution,the government has emphasized the environmental information disclosure of companies.However,the existing researches do not include the study of how environmental institutional factors affect corporate environmental information disclosure,nor identify the causal relationship or mechanism of action between environmental policy and corporate information disclosure.In 2006,the Shenzhen Stock Exchange(SZSE)enacted the Guidelines on Social Responsibility of Companies listed on the SZSE.Using the Guidelines as a natural experiment,we construct a sample of listed companies and study the impact of the Guidelines on corporate environmental information disclosure with a difference-in-differences method.We find that the enactment of the Guidelines not only pushed up the probability of listed companies disclosing environmental information,but also improved the quality of that.Moreover,the triple-differences test based on the perspective of legal environment and analyst attention shows that the better the legal system environment in the region where the listed company is located and the higher the degree of analysts attention,the greater the effect of the Guidelines on improving the disclosure of environmental information.These results clearly identify the causal relationship between the enactment of the Guidelines by the SZSE and the improvement of environmental information disclosed by listed companies.In order to improve the quality of environmental information disclosure,it’s necessary to perfect the legal environment further and instance the supervisory system of the asset market’s information disclosure,regularize the behavior of environmental information disclosure.In addition,both the supervision of the asset market on information disclosure and the awareness of disclosing quality environmental information by companies should be strengthen.