Defend Themselves Or Show Themselves?

With the increasing attention to environmental events, based on the signal theory andlegitimacy theory, this paper studies the relationship between environmental performance andenvironmental disclosure from the dual perspective of economics and sociology. Further, thispaper explores the influence on the relationship by environmental performance level, thecharacteristic of corporation and the type of environmental information.Taking the heavy polluting industries’ corporation of year2008~2010in Shanghai andShenzhen Stock Exchange as the sample, this paper shows the U-shape relationship between theenvironmental performance and disclosure. If the characteristic of corporation is considered, it isfound that when the environmental performance at a low level, the relationship in state-ownedcorporation is significantly stronger than the non-state-owned, showing that the state-ownedcorporation faces more legitimacy pressure; when the environmental performance at a high level,the relationship is not significantly different in state-owned and non-state-owned corporation.Considering the difference of environmental information, the relationship betweenenvironmental performance and disclosure quantity and disclosure quality are different. Whenthe environmental performance at a low level, the environmental performance and disclosurequantity are negative related; when the environmental performance at a high level, theenvironmental performance and disclosure quality are significant positive related, showing thatpoorer environmental performance corporation through environmental disclosure to defendhimself and better environmental performance corporation through disclosure to show himself.This paper makes up the shortage of study on the relationship between environmentalperformance and disclosure and promotes academia for further study of the relationship,moreover, provides some basis for stakeholders to make decision.