The Influence Of Institutional Pressure On Enterprise Environmental Information Disclosure

In recent years,with the rapid development economy in China,a series of environmental problems emerge in endlessly,causing the attention of relevant departments and social groups,the 2017 government work report is to express the great determination of environmental governance.As the center of economic activities,environmental responsibilities of enterprises in achieving win-win between economic and environmental has become a consensus.In this context,many accounting scholars have also actively engaged in the study of environmental protection,resulting in the concept of “environmental accounting”,and corporate environmental information disclosure has always been a research hotspot in the field of environmental accounting.Based on external pressure constraints and their own business strategies,some enterprises disclose their environmental management attitudes by disclosing the performance of environmental responsibility in annual reports or other relevant reports in order to obtain legitimate support.However,the current situation of environmental information disclosure in Chinese enterprises shows that the quality of disclosure is uneven.How to improve the level of environmental information disclosure in Chinese enterprises has become a significant topic.Enterprise environmental information disclosure behavior is under pressure from many aspects,including the government,industry associations,the public and so on.In fact,different types of pressure will affect enterprise behavior to varying degrees.As an important part of external pressure perceived by enterprises,how does institutional pressure impact the quality of enterprise environmental information disclosure is worth further researching?This paper takes the listed companies of heavy pollution industry in Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets from 2013 to 2017 as the research object.Through sorting out the existing literature,it finds the research breakthrough point.Based on the system theory,legitimacy theory,signal transmission theory,etc.,it deeply analyzes the mechanism of external institutional pressure on the quality of environmental information disclosure,and according to the source of the institution and characteristics,from the two angles of formal institutional pressure and informal institutional pressure,explore the impact of different institutional forms on the quality of environmental information disclosure.It use content analysis to measure the quality of environmental information disclosure,and construct multiple regression model to validate relevant assumptions.The empirical results show that:(1)formal institutional pressure has a positive impact on the quality of environmental information disclosure;(2)informal institutional pressure has a positive impact on the quality of environmental information disclosure;(3)informal institutional pressure has a certain substitution effect on formal institutional pressure.When formal institutional pressure is week,informal institutional pressure has a positive impact on environmental information disclosure.Informal institutional pressure plays an important role in improving the quality of environmental information disclosure.The conclusion shows that the combination of formal system and informal system can play a better role in promoting enterprises to disclose environmental information.Finally,combining with the theoretical and empirical results of this paper,it provides policy recommendations and suggestions on how to improve the disclosure of corporate environmental responsibility information,and points out the limitations and shortcomings of the study.