Is A Beauty Worth Thousand Words?The Influence Of Social Responsibility Reports’ Aesthetics On Corporate Debt Cost

Influenced by national policies and strategies such as "targeted poverty alleviation,targeted poverty alleviation" and "carbon peaking and carbon neutrality",government departments,consumers and investors pay more and more attention to the implementation of corporate Social Responsibility Report(CSR),and enterprises have gradually increased their awareness of social responsibility.The effective performance and disclosure of the performance of social responsibility has been incorporated into the strategic planning of more and more companies.As an effective carrier of the disclosure of social responsibility,the CSR has received unprecedented attention and attention from all walks of life.However,most of the existing studies focus on the content and textual features of social responsibility reports,while few studies focus on the visual and aesthetic features of social responsibility reports and their economic consequences.Meanwhile since the data processing methods adopted in previous studies are difficult to automatically and on a large scale measure and quantify abstract visual features such as aesthetics,the existing studies mainly focus on more specific and detailed visual elements such as the number of pictures,the number of colors and the proportions of pictures and texts in the report,and do not directly measure and compare the more global and advanced concept of aesthetics.Therefore,this study will apply deep learning algorithm to measure and extract variable indicators reflecting the aesthetic degree of social responsibility report,and further explore the impact of aesthetic degree of report on debt financing cost.Specifically,this paper takes the listed companies that disclosed their social responsibility reports from 2007 to 2019 as an example,uses Python to crawl the social responsibility reports disclosed in each year,and uses deep learning method for the first time to measure the aesthetic index in the social responsibility report,and then tests the empirical relationship between the aesthetic variable of the report and the cost of debt financing.The results show that:(1)The higher the aesthetics of the CSR report of the listed company,the lower the debt financing cost,which means that the more beautiful CSR report can reduce the information acquisition cost of creditors and help to convey positive information disclosure signals to creditors.(2)The restraining effect of the aesthetic degree of social responsibility report on debt financing cost is particularly obvious for state-owned enterprises,enterprises with high analyst tracking and enterprises with high shareholding share of institutional investors.In addition,this paper further found that the signal amplification effect of social responsibility report aesthetics still exists in companies with high media attention,and the research conclusion is still verified under the condition of firm fixed effect.This study has the following contributions:(1)In terms of theoretical contributions,different from previous studies’ focus on report disclosure and value perception,this study verified the effect of the aesthetics of social responsibility report on debt financing cost through econometrics,which expanded our theoretical understanding of the economic impact of social responsibility report and expanded the application of aesthetic theory perspective in the field of accounting and finance.At the same time,this study reveals the influence of visual and aesthetic features on the effect of information transmission,and finds the moderating effect of internal and external features of enterprises,which expands the relevant achievements of aesthetic information evaluation and transmission in the field of information management.(2)In terms of the application of methods,this study applies the cutting-edge methods of deep learning to the research of corporate social responsibility,which makes up for the shortcomings of the previous aesthetic measurement methods,expands the application of computational aesthetics,and promotes the cross integration of artificial intelligence technology and financial research.(3)In terms of management practice,the research conclusion provides a new perspective for enterprises to make and disclose social responsibility reports,and also provides a reference for regulatory departments to evaluate and standardize social responsibility reports.