Research On Correlation Between Environmental Information Disclosure,Environmental Performance And Cost Of Equity Capital

As early as the period of agricultural civilization,there were sages who proposed that human activities should follow the laws of nature.At the same time,there are management systems that have emerged to standardize human's development behavior to nature.The behavior has made the Chinese civilization prosperous,which shows the basic position of the ecological environment in human development.Nowadays,Economy is developing at a rapid pace in China.Enterprises,as the main body of economic development,have been exposed to environmental pollution and ecological destruction incidents frequently,which let all sectors of society to realize it is imperative to enhance the ability of pollution prevention and control and increase the supervision of corporate pollution discharge.A series of system regulations have been issued to carry out key monitoring for heavily polluting enterprises,requiring companies in heavily polluting industries to disclose real-time automatic monitoring data of pollutants,and encouraging the public to actively monitor and report environmental pollution.At the same time,there are also public welfare environmental research institutions established to monitor the pollution emissions of enterprises in real time and evaluate the environmental impact of enterprises.Therefore,all enterprises in the heavily polluting industry must adopt environmental protection measures in the production process and disclose environmental information under the constraints and pressures of the government and the public.In this context,the question which need to solve is,how does the level of environmental information disclosure of enterprises,especially those in heavily polluting industries,relate to environmental performance? Looking further,are investors in the stock market concerned about the extent of corporate environmental information disclosure and the level of environmental performance? That is,whether companies disclose environmental information and improve environmental performance can reduce their financing costs?Based on the data of heavy polluting companies listed in Shanghai & Shenzhen A-Share Stock Market from 2015 to 2017,this paper empirically explores the relationship between environmental information disclosure and environmental performance,in addition,the paper also analyzed the impact of the previous two on the cost of equity capital.The environmental information disclosure and environmental performance of the enterprises mainly use the index method in content analysis method to grade and evaluate the corresponding index system,then the paper use the OJN model to calculate the equity financing cost of the enterprise.The results show that:(1)Under the premise of not considering the impact of the listing period,the environmental information disclosure level and environmental performance have proved a significant U-shaped relationship through regression analysis.(2)The longer the enterprise is listed,The positive effect of environmental performance on environmental information disclosure is more significant.(3)Corporate environmental performance is not related to cost of equity.(4)There is a significant negative correlation between the level of corporate environmental information disclosure and the cost of equity.(5)Compared with private companies,under the condition that the level of environmental information disclosure is high,the cost of equity capital of state-owned enterprises is reduced more;while the level of environmental information disclosure is low,state-owned enterprises are often required higher rates of return.According to the research results,this paper puts forward relevant suggestions from three levels which believes that enterprises should change their attitudes to actively disclose environmental information and improve environmental performance,while the government and the public should act as effective external guides and supervisors.To make enterprises aware of the social and economic benefits of environmental protection,actively promote enterprises to pay attention to the improvement of environmental performance,and timely release environmental information.