Environmental Information Disclosure,Audit Opinion And Audit Fee

The effective operation of the capital market can't do without information disclosure,information environment has always been the focus issue of academia and practical circle.As the constantly strengthen of the uncertainty of information environment,capital market participants have come to realize the inherent limitations of financial information,and the attention of non-financial information is increasing day by day because the needs for decision-making can't be meet by relying on financial information only.The effectivity of non-financial information has been widely recognized,including Information management and risk disclosure function.At the same time of reducing information asymmetry,non-financial information can also reflect enterprise's operational and fraud risk.Deep pocket theory claims that audit have verification and insurance value,so the operating and fraud risk are important part of the audit risk.Risk-oriented audit points out the necessity of focusing on non-financial information for better identification of financial fraud and reducing audit risk.Environmental information is an important part of non-financial information which bond to contribute to auditor's financial fraud identification.In this paper,with the background of the launch of environmental disclosure rules,we examined whether and how their environmental disclosure affects audit fees and opinions.After reviewing the related literature of environmental information disclosure,audit opinion and audit fee,the paper made a theoretical analysis and raised research hypothesis.More specifically,based on deep pocket theory,agenda setting theory,impression management theory and legitimacy theory,the paper explained the value-added role of environmental information disclosure for audit risk identification,analyzed the effect of internal and external environmental factors on the relationship between environmental information disclosure,audit opinion and audit fee.Furthermore,the paper explored the mechanism of environmental information disclosure on audit opinion and audit fee based on finite theory and upper echelon theory.Then from the empirical view,firstly,taking policy change as adjustment variable,the paper examined the usefulness of policy change and the effect of environmental information disclosure on audit opinion and audit fee,and found that policy change promotes the improvement of the state of environmental information disclosure,which is good for the identification of audit risk,and as a result the auditors charge lower fees and reduce the propensity to issue qualified audit opinion.After that,from the perspective of media attention,industry type and internal control,the paper adopted grouping method to test the role of enterprise environment in regulating the relationship between environmental information disclosure and auditors.We found that the effect of environmental information disclosure on auditors is stronger in enterprises with a high media attention,with a higher level of internal control and in pollution-prone industries.Furthermore,the paper used earnings management to test the impact path of environmental information disclosure on audit opinion and audit fee,and found that there is a strong negative correlation between environmental information disclosure and earnings management.Finally,this article carried on a robustness test with different types of environmental information disclosure and an endogenous test with lagged audit fee/opinion,and found that the conclusion above still hold after considering the endogeneity under the background of policy change,and the conclusion is more significant under "hard disclosure".Under the background of environmental policy changes,the paper expands the study of the economic consequences of environmental information disclosure from the angle of the auditors creatively,enriches the relationship between environmental information disclosure,audit opinion and audit fee,giving an empirical evidence for the value-added role of non-financial information,which is good for the improvement of the audit opinion and audit fee mode.