Research On The Economic Consequence Of Public Company’s Environmental Information Disclosure

With the development of social economy, the worsen ecological environment is gradually attracting the attention of countries around the world. As the microeconomic unit, enterprise is not only a wealth creator but also an environmental polluter. So how to balance the economic benefit, environment efficiency and social efficiency is a tough problem faced by enterprise in the process of development. In the1970s, the emergence of environmental accounting makes the corporation find a balance between the economic development and environmental protection, especially the disclosure of enterprise’s environmental information, which combines the economic efficiency and the responsibility of environmental protection closely. However, in China, except for the compulsory information disclosure of the public company in heavy pollution industry, other industries are all voluntary to disclose the environmental information. Because of this, it is appear to that many companies disclose little relevant environment information and even not, which lead to ignore the disclosure of environmental information.Based on the corporate social responsibility theory (CSR), stakeholder theory, principal-agent theory, asymmetric information theory and signal transmission theory, this paper review the domestic and foreign literature about the disclosure of environmental information, analyzing the economic consequence of public company’s environmental information disclosure and putting forward some relevant assumptions. We also make full use of the data of the public companies in the heavy pollution industry to conduct an empirical research about the economic consequence of public company’s environmental information.In the empirical research, taking the A-share public company in the heavy pollution industry as sample, this paper selects five years data of sample corporations from2008to2012to make an empirical analysis on the economic consequence of public company’s environmental information disclosure from two perspective, corporate value and the cost of equity capital. At last, based on the descriptive statistical analysis, correlation analysis, multiple regression analysis and stability test, we can get following conclusions.(1) In regard to the relationship of the environmental information disclosure level and the corporate value, public company’s environmental information disclosure level in China has a positive correlation relationship with the corporate value. The better the environmental information disclosure level, the higher the corporate value.(2) With respect to the relationship of the environmental information disclosure level and the cost of equity capital, they show the negative correlation relationship. The better the environmental information disclosure level, the lower the cost of equity capital.Finally, in order to promote companies to disclose higher quality environmental information, combined with the research findings, we will put forward some relevant recommendations for policy-making departments, regulators, companies and investors.