Research On The Influence Of Government Regulation And Media Reports On Enterprise Water Information Disclosure

On the one hand,enterprises are the direct creators of wealth in economic society,which promoting China’s rapid development.On the other hand,enterprises are also the main producer of pollution and other ecological problems.Mankind should explore the path for both economic development and environmental governance.Full enterprise information disclosure is a prerequisite for environmental governance.However,some enterprises make selective disclosure for the purpose of external legitimacy.External environmental protection supervision has become an important driving factor for enterprise water information disclosure.Based on previous studies,this paper combines legitimacy theory,information asymmetry theory,signaling theory and principal-agent theory,making theoretical analysis from the perspective of government,media and enterprise utility maximization.This paper constructs a game theoretical framework contained government,media and enterprise;Based on the above theories,this paper expounds the enterprises heterogeneous disclosure behavior under the pressure of external supervision;Select the A-share listed companies in the water sensitive industries of Shanghai and Shenzhen in2015-2019 as samples,this paper constructed the indicators of mandatory,substantive and selective disclosure of enterprises water information,and analyze the impact of government regulation and media reports on the content of enterprises heterogeneous water information disclosure.The contributions of this paper mainly are: 1)Through the establishment of the mixed game of government,media and enterprises,the paper analyzes the mechanism of external pressure on the enterprises water information disclosure.From the three dimensions of mandatory and selective water information disclosure,this paper discusses the mechanism of external environmental supervision pressure on the enterprise’s heterogeneous disclosure content.2)Analyze the content of enterprises water information disclosure based on "word frequency analysis".It not only realizes the quantitative analysis of the water information disclosure content,but also helps to measure the heterogeneous effect of external supervision on water information disclosure.3)This paper reveals that there is a "U" relationship between government regulation,media reports and different dimensions of water information disclosure.This thesis discusses the influence of the media reports frequency in the content of enterprises water information disclosure,and the influence of the media report trend on the enterprises water information disclosure.This paper enriches the researches of water information disclosure.The main conclusions are as follows:(1)The level of Chinese companies’ water information disclosure is low,and there are few studies on the driving factors of enterprises water information disclosure behavior in the academic field.Although the government and the media play an important regulatory role in the enterprise’s information disclosure,at present,there is no exact same conclusion about the enterprises water information disclosure behavior.(2)Different external supervision has heterogeneous and nonlinear effects on the content of enterprises water information disclosure.The influence of government regulation on the water information disclosure is in the inverted "U" shape of increasing first and then decreasing,while there is no significant influence on substantive disclosure and mandatory disclosure that are not easy to manipulate;With the increase of media coverage,the selective and substantive water information disclosure shows a positive "U" pattern,while the mandatory disclosure shows an inverse "U" pattern;The media reports trend has no significant impact on the selective water information disclosure,but the substantive water information disclosure shows an inverted "U" shape,and the impact on the mandatory disclosure shows a positive "U" shape on the contrary.(3)Considering the interaction between government regulation and media report on enterprise water information disclosure,this paper found that media report has a reverse regulatory effect on the mandatory disclosure,and media reports frequency has a reverse regulatory effect on the selective disclosure.The research results show that different regulatory methods have heterogeneous effects on the content of enterprise disclosure.Based on this,this paper puts forward the following policy recommendations from three positions:First,the government should improve the effectiveness to promote enterprises fulfilling their environmental responsibilities.Secondly,the government can establish corresponding water information disclosure standards,guide enterprises to improve information disclosure behavior,and the quality of enterprises water information disclosure.In addition,the government can formulate additional incentive mechanisms to compensate enterprise information disclosure.Second,the media should correctly play the role of public opinion guide,increase the coverage of enterprises environmental behavior with high water consumption,and reduce the information asymmetry between the people and enterprises.At the same time,the media should supervise enterprises environmental behavior and ensure the reports trend fairness and authenticity to avoid misleading public.In addition,the media should actively cooperate with the government to vigorously publicize the environmental protection policies formulated by the relevant departments,arouse public attention,and promote enterprises to correctly and effectively disclose water information.Third,for enterprises,more and more policies are issued to balance the industrial economy development and environmental governance.As a new force of water pollution,enterprises should comply with the call of the government and society,follow the relevant disclose norms to ensure their own environmental behavior legally and reasonably,establish a positive environmental protection concept,adopt environmental protection practices,and achieving a win-win environment and economy.