CSR Disclosure、Marketization Process And Debt Financing Costs

With the advancement of China’s socialist modernization,enterprises begin to pay attention to whether they should undertake social responsibilities while pursuing the maximization of interests.The social problems,which mainly focus on environmental problems,product quality problems and employees’ rights and interests,make the public and media to take notice of the relationship between enterprises and the whole society.In this context,in the past decade,the academic research on the economic consequences of corporate social responsibility disclosure has become more abundant,but these researches mostly focuses on the relationship between corporate performance,There are few researches on financing cost especially debt financing cost.Previous studies have shown that corporation social responsibility information reporting quality can promote the improvement of corporate financial performance,but there are discussion in whether it is because of increased revenues or decreased costs or both.The quality of social responsibility information disclosure reflects the maintenance of credit relationship between enterprises and various stakeholders,and as one of them,debt investors are bound to make corresponding feedback due to the social behavior of enterprises.Therefore,this paper studies the relationship between social responsibility information disclosure and debt financing.Due to the unbalanced development of various regions in the current stage of China’s socialist modernization.There are differences in the external market environment,policy implementation efficiency and timeliness of information transmission of enterprises in different regions.This results in different levels of authenticity and timeliness of CSR disclosure in different places of operation.In view of the above,based on the study of the impact of corporate social responsibility information disclosure on debt financing costs,this paper will further study the impact of marketization process on the relationship between social responsibility and debt financing costs.This paper takes China’s a-share listed companies from 2013 to 2018 as the research object,studies the impact of corporate disclosure of social responsibility information on debt financing cost,and then studies the impact of disclosure quality of social responsibility information on debt financing cost in the sample of disclosed social responsibility information.At the same time,the difference between the state-owned and non-state-owned samples was compared and analyzed by grouping the state-owned enterprises into groups.Finally,the adjustment of market process to the relationship between social responsibility disclosure and debt financing cost is analyzed.The research results show that corporate social responsibility information disclosure is beneficial to reduce the debt financing cost,and the higher levels of disclosure,the lower the cost of debt financing,the enterprise positive social responsibility easing and contradiction between the interests of the debtor as one of the stakeholders,companies are more likely to get a lower cost of borrowing and use more interest-free business model.In addition,the marketization process will affect the debt financing cost of local enterprises,and the higher the level of marketization process in the region where enterprises operate,the more significant the effect of CSR disclosure level on the reduction of debt financing cost.Finally,based on the empirical conclusions,this paper puts forward a number of relevant Suggestions,that is,the government departments through legislation and other means to improve the social responsibility information disclosure incentive policy;Enterprises should strengthen the consciousness of undertaking social responsibility actively and strive to improve their social responsibility information disclosure level.The public and media have joined hands with enterprises to further promote the balanced development of marketization in various regions.The research is beneficial to enhance the awareness of enterprises’ proper disclosure of social responsibility information,and has certain enlightenment significance to enterprises’ high-quality disclosure of non-financial information and the government’s further promotion of the balanced development of marketization in various regions.