A Study On Imitation In Corporate Social Responsibility Information Disclosure

In recent years,there are so many problems generating from a lack of social responsibility,such as toxic vaccine,environmental pollution,donation fraud.The community has being highly concerned about the social responsibility implementation and disclosure of the companies.The government and the relevant regulators have also promulgated a number of policies and regulations to enforce the standardized social responsibility and the disclosure of the listed companies.Our country research on corporate social responsibility information disclosure too late so it was still in the developing stage comparing to Western countries.The academic session current research mainly focuses on the factors of influence and the economic consequences of the CSR information disclosure.So there is lack of the research on the disclosure of the CSR.The study of the process that CSR information disclosure is significant.Based on the framework of the new institutionalism theory,this paper applies empirical research method to study imitation in CSR information disclosure,and then compared the difference between mandatory and voluntary disclosure listed companies.At last this paper studies the impact on the market reaction in different imitation degree.Firstly,this paper induces and summarizes the relevant literature from the aspects of social responsibility information disclosure and imitation;Secondly,the paper proposes the four hypothesis basing on the stakeholder theory,the new institutionalism theory,the organizational learning theory.Then,choose the companies that Rankins CSR Ratings publish the rating from 2014 to 2016 as the research samples,studying three imitation modes of CSR information disclosure,and comparing the difference between mandatory disclosure and voluntary disclosure companies,studying the impact on the market reaction in different imitation degree.Ultimately this paper also gives a further exploration about the corporate social responsibility information disclosure.This paper concludes as follows: There is Frequency-based imitation existing in corporate social responsibility information disclosure,which is imitating the average disclosure level of the market in the previous year.There is Trait-based imitation existing in corporate social responsibility information disclosure,which is imitating the level of asset size leader in the previous year.There is Outcome-based imitation existing in corporate social responsibility information disclosure to imitate the companies which obtained a good market response from releasing the corporate social responsibility report.Compared to voluntary disclosure,the mandatory disclosure of social responsibility reporting of companies has more imitative behavior.In order to divide the groups into the high degree of imitation and the low degree of imitation,this paper builds imitation index.Comparison results show that market response is positively related to the level of corporate social responsibility information disclosure,and the low level of imitation of the market reaction is better.