Research On Social Responsibility Disclosure And Corporate Characteristics

With the development of economic and social progress, corporate social responsibility has become a global trend. More and more enterprises start to disclose social responsibility information comprehensively. Undertaken of corporate social responsibility and disclosure of the relevant information can not only improve social status, but also reduce operating costs and promote the rapid development of enterprises. In China, manufacturing companies account for more than half of listed companies, therefore, it will be meaningful to study social responsibility information disclosure of listed companies.By reviewing literatures on social responsibility disclosure and relevant theoretical basses, I selected the stakeholder theory, agency theory, signaling theory as theoretical basis of corporate social responsibility information disclosure. This paper defined the contents of social responsibility information disclosure as seven types and thirty detailed types. The outcome showed that the disclosure level was rising annually, but the overall level was low; the way of disclosure was diverse and normalized gradually; the contents disclosed are casual and less quantitative; the level also changed according to the ownership and industries of the company. In order to study the relationship between social responsibility information disclosure and corporate characteristics, this paper selected 1737 manufacturing companies'2006-2008 three years consecutive date as samples, and established seven assumptions to do multiple linear regressions.Empirical studies indicated:(1) company size, ownership, industry category and managerial ownership affected corporate social responsibility information disclosure significantly; (2) debt to assets ratio and return on equity did not have significant relationship with corporate social responsibility information disclosure. According to the empirical results, in order to enhance the disclosing level of social responsibility information, we should start from the following aspects:enhance the awareness of social responsibility, establish evaluation system; intensify supervision; intensify the exemplary role of state-owned enterprises; increased participation of stakeholders; increase the proportion of management ownership appropriately. Hoping that this paper will be helpful to the implementation of taking social responsibility and the level of relevant information disclosure.