A Study On The Influence Of External Pressure On The Impression Management Of Corporate Environmental Information Disclosure

In the context of the increasingly serious water pollution problem,the issue of water discharge of enterprises has become more and more concerned by all sectors of society.Due to the objective existence of information asymmetry,water information disclosure is not only an important part of corporate environmental responsibility,but also an important channel for the outside world to understand corporate water discharge.However,some enterprises,in order to meet the requirements of legality,establish a good social image of environmental compliance,meet the requirements of legality and achieve the desired goals,the water information disclosed and the real water management situation there are certain differences,there is less disclosure,exaggerated disclosure and other phenomena,that is,in the water information disclosed by enterprises found in the impression of management behavior.In recent years,the active implementation of green finance policies in China has "tied" corporate behavior to its environmental performance.Companies with good environmental performance are more likely to be favored by society and to receive financial support.Water information disclosure as an important means of corporate environmental responsibility,because at this stage China has not made clear provisions for the manner,form and content of water information disclosure,so for China’s water-sensitive industries,the water information disclosure of enterprises in order to better meet their own needs,and the water information disclosure process to take the impression of management strategies to achieve the beautification of corporate water management situation Water pollution emissions,establish a green image and thus gain the recognition and continued support of stakeholders? Can the government and the media,as the main external environmental monitoring force,play a supervisory role on corporate water information disclosure(WID)? How do firms adjust their WID strategies to cope with external environmental supervision as the water pollution problem becomes increasingly serious? The exploration of the above issues will not only help stakeholders to more fully understand the situation of corporate water disclosure,but also have an inspirational effect on the improvement of government policies and the way of media monitoring.From the perspective of the firms’ WID,companies in water-sensitive industries listed on Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share Stock Exchanges from 2015 to 2019 were taken as samples,and the text analysis technology combined with the characteristics of the Chinese language was applied to analyze how external environmental supervision influenced the companies’ EID.The results showed that:(i)There existed a positive U-shaped relationship between government regulation intensity(GRI),media reporting intensity(MRI),and the amount of the firms’ water information texts(AWT).(ii)There was an inverted U-shaped relationship between media reporting tendency(MRT)and the tone of the corporate water information texts(TWT).(iii)Further tests demonstrated that high-intensity media reports strengthened the positive U-shaped relationship between GRI and AWT and weakened the inverted U-shaped relationship between MRT and TWT.In addition,the U-shaped inflection points lagged later under high-intensity media reports.(iv)The heterogeneity analysis revealed that,compared with firms that had not passed ISO14001 certification,there were no significant U-shaped relationships between GRI and AWT in the company that had passed.The positive U-shaped inflection points lagged later between MRI and AWT,and the inverted U-shaped inflection points appeared in advance between MRT and TWT.In contrast to the areas with better water resource quality,the impact of government supervision and media reports on corporate WID showed no significant U-shaped relationships in areas with poor water resource quality.The results theoretically revealed the mechanism between government regulation,media reporting,and WID,and provided a method for measuring water information disclosure behavior from the perspective of text analysis.In practice,the U-shaped relationships can provide some references for the government and the media to implement differentiation measures within different ranges of U-shaped curves on promoting WID.Possible innovations of the study are:(i)based on the perspective of water disclosure,an innovative introduction of impression management into the study of corporate water disclosure;and an examination of the influence of government and media on impression management of corporate water disclosure.(ii)Constructed a water disclosure keyword word set and sentiment dictionary,which provides the possibility to effectively extract corporate water management information and calculate text tone.(iii)Different from the previous content analysis method,the article adopts the text analysis method to study corporate water information disclosure,which provides ideas for subsequent research in terms of research methods.The research in this paper provides a new perspective for a more comprehensive understanding of corporate environmental information disclosure behavior and helps information users to deal with the possible impression management behavior in corporate water information disclosure.