Study On The Correlation Between Voluntary Carbon Disclosure And Financial Performance

With the adverse effects of global climate change growing, governments come torealize the serious effect of carbon emissions. It’s an inevitable option to embark onthe road to a low carbon economy. Under the background of low carbon economy, dueto the lack of mandatory requirements, increasing number of enterprises disclosurecarbon information voluntarily. As we know, enterprises are profit-driven groups.Whether such voluntary disclosure affects performance becomes this paper’s topic.For that reason, this paper analyses the mechanism of carbon disclosure affectingperformance in-depth, based on stakeholder, asymmetric information and signaltransmission theory. Set CDP as a research platform and select S&P500enterprisesfrom2010to2012as study samples, this paper tests the effect of carbon disclosure onfinancial performance considering carbon emissions. On this basis, a further study hasbeen taken to prove that different disclosure contents have different effects onfinancial performance. The research shows that overall although carbon emissions arenegatively related to financial performance, the introduction of voluntary carbondisclosure not only helps to improve financial performance, but also weakens thenegative effect of carbon emissions to financial performance. In addition, due to thelag factors, carbon disclosure effecting on financial performance positively will beextended to the next. There exits inter-temporal phenomenon. From carbon disclosurecontents, disclosure of carbon emissions and climate change management can attractstakeholders’ interest easily, and have a great correlation on financial performance.The empirical results highlight the importance of voluntary carbon disclosure.Therefore, companies with poor carbon disclosure should foster awareness of carbondisclosure and strengthen the disclosure of carbon emissions and climate changemanagement, so as to enable enterprises to recognize the importance of carbondisclosure, and step to improve disclosure level.