Impace Of Environmental Information Disclosure On Debt Financing Costs And Corporate Credit Scale

In recent years,with the continuous development of the economy and society,the problems of environmental pollution and ecological destruction have become more and more serious,which has aroused the close attention of the whole society.The report of the 19 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China pointed out that we must vigorously promote the construction of ecological civilization.The modernization we pursue is the modernization of harmony between people and nature.As an extremely important part in rapid development of industrial society,enterprises have destroyed ecological balance and caused serious environmental pollution while promoting social progress.In order to strengthen the enterprises' environmental awareness,the government has introduced relevant policies to restrict the environmental behavior of enterprises by means of external financing,and aims to encourage them to actively disclose environmental information.The part of the social responsibility report disclosed by the enterprise about the environmental protection policy is the main reference of the stakeholders' assessment of the environmental behavior of the enterprise.Moreover,the company needs to raise a large amount of funds for the continuous operation,and the cost of financing has an impact on the company's profit.Therefore,in order to reduce financing costs and obtain more bank loans,heavily polluting enterprises voluntarily disclose their environmental behaviors and earnestly fulfill their environmental responsibility to prove their environmental awareness and environmental enthusiasm to the public and stakeholders.After reviewing the relevant literatures on environmental information disclosure,debt financing costs and corporate credit scale,the paper puts forward relevant research hypotheses based on the status quo of disclosure of environmental information by specific heavily polluting enterprises and their corresponding financing and loans.On the basis of summarizing the research results of environmental information disclosure index by domestic and foreign scholars,this paper collects the annual report and independent report of the listed companies with the top 20% of the average assets of the A-share heavy polluting industry in Shanghai in 2012-2016,and establishes the EDI index system,then controls the relevant variables,and uses the ordinary least squares method for regression analysis to study the impact of environmental behaviors in heavy polluting industries on corporate debt financing costs and credit scale.The research results show that the active disclosure of environmental information by heavily polluting enterprises can improve the transparency of internal information,and alleviate the information asymmetry between investors and enterprises.Investors can effectively predict their risks,thereby reducing the debt financing costs of enterprises.The public environmental behavior of heavily polluting enterprises is conducive to obtaining more bank loans,and has a significant positive impact on the scale of long-term and shortterm loans.Possible innovations in this paper: First,when measuring the level of environmental information disclosure,it is mainly based on the “Guidelines for Environmental Information Disclosure of Listed Companies of Shanghai Stock Exchange” and “Guidelines for Environmental Information Disclosure of Listed Companies” to select and set specific evaluation indicators,and thus quantify specific information,so the indicator system has certain objectivity and reliability,and the obtained environmental information disclosure index is also more convincing,enriching the evaluation method of environmental information disclosure.Secondly,considering the impact of macro-monetary policy,the paper further analyzes the impact of the disclosure of environmental information on debt financing costs and corporate credit scale during the monetary policy tightening period and monetary policy easing period,and explores the micro-behavior of enterprises from a macro perspective.