Study On The Third-party Assurance And The Quality Of CSR Report From Empirical Data Of A-share Listed Companies In China

Along with the reform, China has experienced rapid development of three decades, replaced Japan as the world’s second largest economy in the world in2010. However, it produced environmental pollution, ecological destruction, and a series of problems. Enterprise as an organic part in the society, it is responsible for workers, creditors, suppliers, customers, the all-round development of the natural environment and society. Therefore, our government and related institutions has released a series of policies and regulations about social responsibility, required enterprises to perform the social responsibility actively in recent years.Currently, although the number of social responsibility reports is increasing, but the quality were uneven. Only a few of corporate introduced third-party verifications for social responsibility reports. The researchers became to concern whether the introductions of third-party verifications have affects to the quality of social responsibility-reports. Currently, the studies of that are still in the initial stage. The relevant theoretical and empirical researches are far from adequate. The study of it can contributes to the deep study of the effects of third-party verifications, and provide the basis for the legalization of mechanisms of third-party verifications, and it can also provide theoretical basis and empirical evidences for the bodies of reasonable assurances and the forensic standards.Through an overview of the relevant literatures, we can found that the foreign literatures mainly emphasis on the concept of third-party verification> the role and the motivation of it and the investigations of the theory of its legalization Legal mechanism. The domestic literatures of third-party verifications are few. The Theoretical and empirical researches at home and abroad for the quality of social responsibility reports were relatively more, and the researches mainly on the factors which have affected to the quality of social responsibility-reports. Studies at home and abroad are very few for the affect of third-party verifications to the quality of social responsibility reports.Therefore, in this thesis, we study the influence of third-party verifications to the quality of social responsibility-reports through the theoretical analysis and empirical. And on this basis, the influence of the body and standards of verifications was be further explored. First, the influence of third-party verifications to the quality of social responsibility-reports was explained by audit information theory and agency theory which was based on the literature review. Secondly, the multiple regression analysis methods was used to return the released386social responsibility-reports Released in2010which have been scored, which can inspect the influences of third-party verifications to the quality of social responsibility-reports on the basis of controlling the variables. Finally, on this basis, the54social responsibility-reports which were introduced in2010and2011was returned. Whether the body and standards have effects to the social responsibility-reports was tested by empirical testing. This thesis is divided into seven parts.The first part mainly introduced the background and significance of the selected topic. It focused on the research methods and ideas of the study on the basis of which the general framework was outlined. Finally, this article was outlined the innovations which may exist.The second part mainly comments the third-party verifications and quality of social responsibility-report of domestic and international research literature, which can lay a good foundation for the further research of this study.Chapter Ⅲ elaborated the Status of development of third-party forensic social responsibility-reports. This section first introduced the current attestation standards related to third-party verifications, on which basis, the Social Responsibility Reports released by Corporate in2010and2012was described, and the third-party forensic introduced in social responsibility-reports was counted and analyzed. The Situation of third-party certification of social responsibility-reports was analyzed from industry distribution, authentication, assurance standards and other aspects.The fourth chapter mainly focused on theoretical analysis. On the basis of the previous study of this thesis studies, the motivations of social responsibility report, the reasons for the introduction of information and the disclosure of third-party verification was analyzed. The Dynamic of disclosures social responsibility information were elaborated on Stakeholder theory, fiduciary theory,"triple bottom line" theory and external pressure, etc. The Dynamic of third-party certification were elaborated on audit information theory, signaling theory, decision usefulness theory, principal-agent theory and sustainable development theory, etc. On this basis, the audit information theory and agency theory was used to explain how the third-party verification influenced the quality of social responsibility-reports of corporate.The fifth chapter mainly elaborated the design and the empirical of this research. In this section, the relevant assumptions were proposed by the analysis of previous theoretical. The variables and samples of the research were determined. And finally, a relevant model was established to service the subsequent empirical analysis.Chapter VI elaborated the empirical results. The variable correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis were used to study the effect of third-party verification, verification body and standards to the quality of CSR report. In this part, robustness tests were done to make results more robust.Chapter VII is mainly talk about the conclusions and recommendations. Based on the results of empirical research, some policy recommendations was derived from aspects of government formulating relevant forensic system, corporate improving social responsibility, social responsibility introduced into the capital market, public awareness of supervision rise, etc.On the basis of empirical study, we find that:(1) currently, the number of social responsibility-reports gradually increased, but the proportion of social responsibility-report which have the content of third-party verifications is still very small, and the quality of it haven’t increased.(2)The quality of social responsibility-reports which have third-party verification reports were significantly higher than that which haven’t it.(3) Regarding about the social responsibility-reports which have third-party verification reports, the quality of the reports whose forensic subject is verification agencies is higher than that whose forensic subject is registered accounting firm.(4) Whether the social responsibility-reports have assurance Standard can affect the quality of social responsibility-reports. The quality is higher whose forensic body disclosure forensic standards.(5) The size of company can affect the quality of social responsibility-reports. The greater the size of the company is, the higher the quality of report is.(6) The financial leverage is negatively related to the quality of social responsibility-reports, the higher the financial leverage is, the lower the quality of the report is.Based on third-party verification as a breakthrough point, this thesis studies the third-party verification, verification subject and verification standard on the quality of the social responsibility report, and discusses respectively from the aspects of theoretical and empirical research, in general, the innovation of this article is mainly for the innovation of the research content.At present, the research about social responsibility report verification is less, can reference and comparability of smaller, given that there are lacking in the professional knowledge, this article has certain limitation, in the process of manual sample collection, hard to avoid some deviation, can try to be patient to each sample data.