Research On Corporate Environmental Information Disclosure Financing Constraints And Environmental Investment

With the rapid development of industrialization in China,the ecological environment is under unprecedented pressure.The frequent occurrence of various eco-environmental pollution events has brought great threat to people’s health and living space,and also increased the supervision pressure of the competent environmental authorities.The environmental events caused by enterprises’ pollution discharge,are gradually derived from the simple government environmental punishment to the effective feedback of the combination of government supervision and investors’ voting with their feet.Under the multiple demands of government departments,investors,the public and other stakeholders for enterprises’ environmental law-abiding,how to better restrict enterprise’ environmental behavior under the existing ecological environment laws and regulations,has become an important content of current environmental management.By systematically and completely carding and disclosing the situation of fulfilling the responsibilities of ecological environment laws and regulations,and undertaking the environmental protection obligations corresponding to economic benefits,the enterprises show their real and objective environmental behaviors and potential environmental risks to the society,which are helpful for maintaining the right of the public to participate in the supervision of the construction of “beautiful China”,protecting the right of investors to know the investment of the sustainable development of the enterprises,and is of great significance to improve the supervision efficiency of environmental authorities.In 2017,the report of the 19 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China proposed that to improve the mandatory information disclosure,which released the important signals and strong determination to improve the construction of the environmental information mandatory disclosure system.The United States,Japan,the European Union and European countries have an early stage of industrialization development,and gradually established the enterprises’ environmental information disclosure system along with the process of enterprises’ environmental pollution events conducted to the capital market,and solidified it through a series of laws and regulations.At present,these developed economies have basically established mature environmental accounting system,environmental audit system,and environmental information disclosure system.After years of implementation and market cultivation,enterprises’ awareness of environmental information disclosure has gradually changed,from passive mandatory disclosure to active voluntary disclosure,which greatly reduce the cost of government environmental supervision and the investors’ risk.From “taking economic development as the center” to “economic construction,political construction,cultural construction,social construction,ecological civilization construction”,and then to “promote high-quality economic development”,the supervision and treatment on enterprises’ environmental pollution discharging is also represented by the gradual process of vacancy,emphasis and compensation.In this gradual process,enterprises’ environmental information disclosure started late,voluntary environmental information disclosure of enterprises is rare,and the results and performance of environmental information disclosure have not been fully tested.In this study,197 enterprises from 14 heavy pollution industries in Shanghai stock market from 2010 to 2017 were selected as samples.The environmental information disclosure index of enterprises was obtained by content analysis scoring method.The changes of environmental information disclosure level covering important time nodes of environmental regulation were investigated.The environmental information disclosure of enterprises was explored by multiple regression analysis under the conditions of information characteristics,enterprises’ characteristics and system background characteristics,we find out the influence factors of corporate governance of enterprise environmental information disclosure,as well as the impact and mechanism of enterprises’ environmental information disclosure on financing constraints,financing costs and environmental protection investment,reveal that there are many positive and positive effects of enterprises’ environmental information disclosure on enterprises.Through a series of detailed research,we explored the system background and enterprise characteristics of enterprises’ environmental information disclosure playing positive role on,then from the perspective of improving the enterprises’ environmental information disclosure system,we put forward some targeted countermeasures and suggestions.We draw main contents and conclusions as follows.First,with the improvement of enterprises’ governance,environmental information disclosure level also increased.This part includes four parts.Firstly,the increasing of the shareholding ratio of the largest shareholder can enhance the strength and voice of the controlling shareholders in environmental protection,then improve the level of environmental information disclosure.Secondly,state-owned holding can release the compliance requirements for enterprises’ environmental information disclosure,and then improve the quality of environmental information disclosure.Thirdly,the separation of two positions in enterprises can effectively improve the supervision of the management,promote the enterprises’ management which strengthening the environmental management and information disclosure in the long run.Fourthly,the scale of the supervisors’ board can strengthen the examination of the legitimacy of the enterprise’s operation and management,correct enterprises’ illegal behaviors in time,and improve the foundation and guarantee of enterprises’ environmental information disclosure.Second,the disclosure of enterprises’ environmental information can effectively alleviate the constraints of enterprises’ financing.This part includes three parts.Firstly,under the same situation,environmental information disclosure can ease the financing constraints faced by enterprises.Secondly,compared with the loose degree of environmental supervision,strict environmental supervision is conducive to strengthen the mitigation effect of corporate environmental information disclosure on financing constraints.Through applying external pressure on enterprises to meet the legal requirements of environmental protection,environmental supervision promotes the enterprises to take a series of environmental protecting measures,so as to reduce environmental risks and investors’ expecting risks,and then reduced the corporate financing constraints.Thirdly,compared with a lower degree of marketization,a higher degree of marketization is conducive to strengthen the mitigation effect of corporate environmental information disclosure on financing constraints,which releasing effects of various market factors on corporate environmental information,improving the degree of market information transparency,unblocking signal transmission channels,and promoting financing efficiency.Next,environmental information disclosure has a significant effect on reducing financing costs.This part includes four parts.Firstly,the disclosure of enterprise environmental information can significantly reduce the cost of equity financing.In the equity capital market,investors can make immediate response to the enterprises’ environmental information,through stock trading volume,stock price and so on.Secondly,the effect of corporate environmental information on reducing the cost of debt financing is not stable,only significant when the enterprises are facing higher debt financing constraints.Thirdly,the effect of environmental information disclosure on financing cost is mainly realized by encouraging environmental information disclosure.At present,the content of mandatory environmental information disclosure in our country pays too much attention on the emission and treatment of environmental pollution,and the relevant information is easy to be classified as negative information by investors,the signal transmission effect of environmental information has not been effectively played.Fourthly,the financing cost reduction effect of environmental information disclosure of state-owned enterprises is more significant.Because of the diversification of social responsibility,state-owned enterprises have good performance in encouraging environmental information disclosure.In addition,investors take credit for the environmental information state-owned enterprises disclosed,which has a more significant effect on reducing the financing cost.Lastly,environmental information disclosure can promote environmental protection investment.This part includes four parts.Firstly,the disclosure of enterprise environmental information promotes the increase of environmental protection investment.Environmental information disclosure,as an effective market signal for enterprises to disclose their own development level to the outside world,improves the transparency of environmental information in the capital market,reduces the information asymmetry between enterprises and investors,improves the capital allocation efficiency in the capital market,enhances the capital supply demanded by enterprises due to environmental protection investment,reduces the financing cost,and thus expands environmental protection investment.Secondly,the environmental information disclosure of state-owned enterprises has a greater effect on environmental protection investment.Due to the original political connection,state-owned enterprises pay more attention to environmental protection compliance behavior,and can carry out environmental governance and information disclosure from the perspective of overall economic and social development effects.The content and quality of environmental information which state-owned enterprises disclosed are more guaranteed,and can be more recognized and recognized by the capital market.Thirdly,the more fully developed regions are,the stronger the promotion effect plays on environmental protection investment.The higher the degree of financial development,the smoother the signal transmission of environmental information disclosure to the capital market,the lower the information asymmetry of the capital market,the lower the cost of financing for enterprises,and then the better guarantee of the capital source of environmental protection investment.Fourthly,the disclosure of enterprises’ environmental information can increase the option value of enterprise growth through the expansion of environmental protection investment.The innovation of this study is mainly reflected in the following aspects.(1)Research perspective innovation.At present,most of the researches on the economic consequences of enterprises’ environmental information disclosure focus on a certain financial performance of enterprises,the combination research on financing constraints,environmental investment together with enterprises’ value is rare.This paper attempts to analyze the impact of enterprises’ environmental information disclosure on financing constraints,and then find out the role of enterprise environmental information disclosure in promoting environmental protection investment together with enterprise value,mainly through reducing financing costs.The mechanism enriches the research on the economic effect of environmental information disclosure.In the regression analysis,we take the nature of enterprise’s equity,the degree of regional marketization,the level of financial development and the degree of government’s environmental supervision as adjusting variables,explore the heterogeneity of economic effects of enterprise’s environmental information disclosure under different backgrounds of equity nature,institutional background and market process,both from the micro and macro level.For the research,we propose that it is important to put forward applicable environmental information countermeasures for both governments,enterprises,and other subjects.(2)Innovation of research methods.Firstly,the innovation of measuring the level of environmental information disclosure.Combined with the current laws,regulations and policy documents on environmental information disclosure in China,this paper puts forward 9 compulsory environmental information disclosure indicators and 9 encouraging environmental information disclosure indicators respectively,constructs the compulsory environmental information index and the encouraging environmental information disclosure index,and makes regression analysis based on the characteristics of the two types of information,which expands the research reality practice value.The second is to expand the research on the mechanism of the impact of environmental information disclosure on environmental protection investment.From dimensions of financing cost channel and operating cash flow channel,this paper uses multiple regression,quantile regression,two-stage regression and other methods,empirically analyze and test the impact of enterprises’ environmental information disclosure playing on their environmental protection investment,and verifies that environmental information disclosure can enhance the value of enterprises’ options by increasing environmental protection investment,enrich the theory of information asymmetry theory and signal transmission theory.