Study On The Relationship Between Corporate Social Responsibility Information Disclosure And The Capital Cost Of Heavy Pollute Public Companies In China

In recent years,with the development of stakeholder theory and social responsibility strategic management theory,corporate social responsibility management has become increasingly professional.As a part of management strategy,corporate social responsibility is more and more closely integrated with various economic activities of enterprises,which makes the impact of social responsibility on business operations more extensive and specific.The impact of corporate social responsibility economic consequences catches the theoretical and practical circles' attention.Focusing on it has become an obvious trend in related research in the past decade.Equity capital is an important source of funds for enterprises.High-quality financial information can reduce the cost of corporate equity capital,which has been widely recognized by the theoretical and practical circles.With the gradual increase of non-financial information disclosure,domestic and foreign scholars have gradually shifted the research focus of the factors affecting the cost of equity capital from financial information to non-financial information.As important non-financial information,the corporate social responsibility information report can theretically reduce the investment risk of investors by reducing the information asymmetry and transmitting positive signals,thus reducing the cost of corporate equity capital.In 2010,the Ministry of Environmental Protection listed 16 industries,including steel,coal,thermal power,and metallurgy,as heavy polluting industries,requiring them to issue regular environmental reports.As of June 2018,there were 856 heavily polluting enterprises in China's A-share listed companies,accounting for 44.17% of the total number of A-share listed companies.The heavy polluting industry includes not only national strategic industries such as steel and thermal power,but also the live-hood industries such as chemical industry,leather industry,which are closely related to people's lives.However,due to the particularity of heavy polluting industries,heavy polluting industries are also a high incidence area for corporate social responsibility issues.Special social responsibility issues such as pollution waste discharge and employee occupational protection are testing the future of China's heavily polluting industries.In order to study the relationship between the quality of corporate social responsibility information disclosure and the cost of equity capital in China's heavy pollution industry,this paper is based on China's pollution industry.On the basis of fully considering the characteristics of China's heavy pollution industry,this paper refers to the Guidelines for the Compilation of China's Social Responsibility Report(CASS-CSR4.0)which is compiled by the Social Responsibility Research Center of the Economics Department of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.Based on the stakeholder theory,this paper has formed a quality evaluation system with six first-level indicators and 20 second-level indicators.And each indicator is assigned with the analytic hierarchy process,which finally forms a quality evaluation system for corporate social responsibility information disclosure in heavy polluting industries with obvious industry characteristics and easy operation.On this basis,this paper takes 419 corporate social responsibility reports issued by China's A-share heavy polluting industry enterprises in 2014-2017 as a sample.The corporate social responsibility information disclosure quality index and the 6 categories of corporate social responsibility information disclosure quality index,which include the environment,government,employees,communities,shareholders,and customers,are the independent variables.And the regression model is established,which overcomes the shortcomings of not knowing the the detailed relationship between the quality of information disclosure and the cost of equity capital of various stakeholders because of the use of RSK database data for regression analysis in existing research.In the end,the empirical results confirm that improving the quality of the environmental,government and corporate social responsibility information disclosure can reduce the cost of equity capital.Based on the above conclusions,this paper gives policy recommendations: First,to develop sound guidelines for social responsibility information disclosure;second,to strengthen policy guidance and encourage enterprises to voluntarily carry out social responsibility information.