Study On The Effect Of Environmental Information Disclosure On The Value Of Listed Companies

With the development of economy and the deepening of environmental problems,enterprises,as an important source of pollution in today’s society,have gained more attention from the public.Environmental problems have strong externalities and require "visible hand" to carry out compulsory intervention.As one of the means of environmental management,environmental information disclosure policy emerges at the historic moment.First,this paper collected as many as possible the social responsibility reports,environmental reports and sustainable development reports of listed companies from 2008 to 2016,a total of 5,022.In addition,the environmental information disclosure index system of 57 secondary indicators in six dimensions was constructed to score the collected reports on the environmental information content,and then the environmental information disclosure index data of listed companies was calculated by the method of empowerment aggregation.Then,the environmental information disclosure of listed companies is comprehensively evaluated in general and in different industries,to show the development and current situation of environmental information disclosure of listed companies,and to reflect the implementation effect of environmental information disclosure policy.Furthermore,this paper makes an empirical analysis of the independent environmental information disclosure index of listed companies and studies its impact on enterprise value.As well as the moderating effect of ownership concentration,proportion of independent directors,size of board of directors and management shareholding on the above two factors in corporate governance.Through policy analysis and empirical analysis,the following conclusions are drawn:(1)the environmental information disclosure policy has not formed a unified standard,and the perfection of the policy needs to be improved;(2)the overall level of environmental information disclosure of listed companies is low and the quality level is uneven,and the disclosure level varies greatly between different enterprises and different industries;(3)the improvement of environmental information disclosure level can significantly enhance enterprise value;(4)ownership concentration has a significant inhibitory effect on the impact of environmental information disclosure on enterprise value,and the proportion of independent directors has a significant inhibitory effect on the impact of environmental information disclosure on enterprise value,while the size of the board of directors and management shareholding have no regulatory effect on environmental information disclosure and enterprise value.There are three possible innovations in this paper:First,the data and sample size are more comprehensive.Previous studies selected only heavily polluting industries,or a specific industry.But to stand in the Angle of the whole China’s a-share listed companies,as fully as possible to collect all the a-share listed companies release social responsibility report,the environment and sustainable development report,and the environmental information disclosure data of 887 listed companies from 2008 to 2016 were obtained after reading the whole report and scoring according to the self-built indicators.Second,the index system is more comprehensive than the previous literature.By referring to the existing environmental information disclosure guidelines,GRI standards and relevant literatures,the environmental information disclosure index system is constructed,which includes 57 indicators in total.In this way,the real situation of the environmental information disclosure level of listed companies can be more comprehensively understood.Third,the research perspective is more novel.Many literatures have studied the impact of corporate governance on enterprise value or corporate governance on environmental information disclosure.In this paper,the introduction of corporate governance is to further verify the regulatory effect of corporate governance on the impact of environmental information disclosure on enterprise value.