An Empirical Study On Determinants Of Environmental Information Disclosure On China’s Listed Companies

With the world’s advocation of low-carbon economy in the21st century,concernfrom all walks of life about the development of heavily polluting enterprises isincreasingly. Heavily polluting enterprises in production are facing pressure from allsectors of society.More and more attention to its impact on the environment, anddisclosure of their own behavior towards environmental protection and otherenvironmental information.Under the conditions of environmental protection andmanagement, the society requires the enterprises to not only disclose their economiccircumstances of the fiduciary duty, but also disclose environment circumstances ofthe fiduciary responsibility. Since the beginning of the1930s, foreign countries havealready made research on environmental accounting, which became one e focus ofaccounting academia, and because environmental information disclosure is the pointof penetration of the environmental accounting, so the study of environmentalinformation disclosure is of great significance.Firstly this thesis reviews the environmental information disclosure of researchresults at home and abroad. Secondly, the writer analyses the factors affectingenvironmental disclosure and disclosure motivation which is based on the asymmetricinformation theory, the theory of entrusted duty, external pressure theory, voluntarydisclosure theory and game theory. Thirdly,in order to carry out environmentalinformation disclosed in further study of the influence factors, this thesis constructsa multivariate regression model for the influencing factors to environmentalinformation disclosure of listed companies in China. Lastly, chemical industry on China listed companies is taken as a case, and the writer construct environmentinformation disclosure index (EDI) which is based on previous study results, anddescribes and analyses the overall level of environmental disclosure of the chemicalindustry in China listed companies in2010, the disclosure of characteristics, excitingproblems. With China’s capital market as the background, from the company’s,characteristics,the governance structure, and the development of the regions,thewriter analyses factors affecting the chemical environment of accounting informationdisclosure by the empirical test. Through empirical research, the writer puts forwardrecommendations accordingly.With descriptive analysis, chemical industry on China’s listed companies overalllevel of environmental disclosure in2010is relatively low, and qualitative disclosureis greater than the quantitative disclosure. Companies tend to disclose the informationwhich can enhance corporate’s image,and don’t disclose the information or lesswhich may damage corporate’s image. In the part of the empirical test, the size oflisted companies, return on equity, the proportion of state-owned shares showed apositive correlation between corporate environmental information and disclosure level.If the chairman and general manager is one person,the level of information disclosureis lower; the asset-liability ratio showed a negative correlation between corporateenvironmental information and disclosure level. Ownership concentration andregional economic development showed no significant relationship with corporateenvironmental information disclosure.