Executive Excess Compensation, Corporate Governance And Environmental Information Disclosure

With the economic and social development,the environmental problems are also coming,and the public's appeal for environmental protection is also increasing.As an important way for enterprises to transmit their environmental information to the public,it has been widely accepted that environmental information disclosure has value relevance.At present,the research of the motivation of environmental information disclosure has become a hot topic and a lot of results have been obtained,it has mainly from market pressure,social environment prompting,corporate responsibility and political reasons and so on.However,whether executives have disclosed environmental information for selfish motivation has not been further explored.Combined with the background of China's “wage restraint” and based on the perspective of compensation defense,this thesis empirically examines whether executives use environmental disclosure for compensation defense in the existence of executive excess compensation,and examines whether corporate governance have an restraining effect on the self-interest behavior of executives.Firstly,this thesis reviews the institutional background of environmental informational disclosure and the compensation policies,based on voluntary information disclosure theory,legitimacy theory,manager power theory and compensation defense hypothesis,this thesis constructs the theoretical analysis framework of the relationship between executive excess compensation and corporate environmental disclosure.Then,on the basis of the evaluation system of corporate environmental information disclosure quality using content analysis method,this thesis empirically test the impact of the executive excess compensation on corporate environmental information disclosure quality,and test the impact of the executive excess compensation on environmental information disclosure,in the case of different compensation demands,such as low relative performance,higher relative pay and low pay performance sensitivity.Secondly,the impact of the corporate governance on the relationship between the executive excess compensation and environmental information disclosure is explored in this thesis.The empirical results shows that:the executive excess compensation is positively correlated with the quality of environmental disclosure,and in the requirement of compensation defense(low relative performance,high relative pay,low pay performance sensitivity),the relationship is more significant.So,it indicates that environmental disclosure becomes a tool to defend executive compensation.Further research shows that,as a representative variable of the company's external governance mechanism,the marketization process can weaken the positive correlation between the excess compensation of executives and environmental information disclosure quality,and it indicates that the external governance mechanism can play a positive role in corporate governance,and can inhibit executive compensation.On the contrary,as a representative variable of internal governance mechanism,internal control and board governance do not play a role in self-interest behavior of executives.This thesis provides new evidence for the view that the nature of environmental disclosure is an impression management,and reveals the fact that executive information disclosure,especially voluntary information disclosure has self-interest motivation.Besides,this paper provides policy reference for providing the corporate-governing mechanism.