An Empirical Study On The Relationship Between The Quality Of ESG Information Disclosure Of Chines Listed Companies And Corporate Debt Financing

Environmental concerns such as extreme weather,natural disasters and global warming occur frequently in recent years,which have made people pay attention to the sustainable development of nature,society and economy,and actively explore effective methods to promote the balanced development of the three,so ESG responsible investment came into being,which is derived from the acronyms of three English words: Environment,Social Responsibility and Corporate Governance.ESG performance can reveal the environmental and social risks in a company’s business activities,and can reflect whether the company has long-term investment value.Internationally developed capital markets often attach importance to the listed companies’ ESG performance.With the acceleration of China’s capital market entry into the international process,academia,financial circles,and third-party rating agencies have accelerated ESG related research and achieved certain results.In the context of sustainable development,banks and other financial institutions are increasingly paying attention to the environmental and social risks of investment objects.Which shows that ESG information disclosure plays a significant role in the process of corporate debt financing.By analyzing the status quo of ESG ratings and debt financing of Chinese enterprises,this paper finds that nearly half of Chinese enterprises’ ESG rating is in the middle level,indicating that the quality of domestic enterprises’ ESG information disclosure still has a large space for improvement.And the debt financing method of domestic enterprises is mainly credit financing,and the scale of debt financing varies greatly in different industries,the heavily polluting industries such as mining ranks the top.By analyzing the realistic characteristics of the key research variables,this paper takes the listed companies rated by ESG of China Securities Index from 2015 to 2020 as the research objects,and measures the quality of ESG information disclosure according to the ESG rating of the China Securities Index to study its impact on the cost of corporate debt financing and the long-term debt financing scale.The empirical regression results indicate that:(1)The quality of ESG information disclosure negatively affects the debt financing cost of enterprises,that is,the improvement of the quality of ESG information disclosure by companies will make creditors reduce the capital compensation rate;(2)the quality of ESG information disclosure is significantly positively related to the scale of long-term debt financing,indicating that if an enterprise discloses ESG information with high quality,it is beneficial for it to acquire long-term debt;(3)Compared with non-environmentally sensitive industries,the ESG information disclosure quality in environmentally sensitive industries has a greater negative impact on debt financing cost;(4)Compared with non-environmentally sensitive industries,the quality of ESG information disclosure in environmentally sensitive industries has a greater positive impact on long-term debt financing scale.The research contribution of this paper as follows.The breakdown of corporate debt financing into debt financing cost and long-term debt financing scale is used as an entry point to gain a more integrate grasp about the influence of the quality of ESG information disclosure on the debt financing ability of enterprise.Besides,based on the characteristics of ESG’s green economy,this paper explore the influence of ESG information disclosure quality on corporate debt financing from the perspective of industry heterogeneity(heavy pollution and non-heavy pollution).These two research perspectives can add related literature on the economic impact of ESG information disclosure quality at home.