Environmental Regulation,Disclosure Of Carbon And The Cost Of Debt

In recent years,various environmental problems have become increasingly prominent,and the issue of climate warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions has been widely concerned by governments and people.Under the background of energy conservation and emission reduction,low-carbon and environment protection,governments have issued relevant policies to guide enterprises to pay attention to carbon information,and urge enterprises to disclose relevant carbon information.Therefore,the carbon information not only attracted the attention of the managers,but also extensive attention from government agencies,investors,news media and consumers.Study on carbon information disclosure emerged.At present,the researches on carbon information disclosure mainly focus on three aspects: the framework construction,influencing factors and economic consequences.The researches on economic consequences mainly focus on the enterprise value and the cost equity capital.At present,debt financing is still an important way of enterprises financing.Under the background of increasing environment regulations,the Banks have launched the green credit,green supply chain management model.Corporate environmental performance is increasingly concerned by creditors and other investors.It has become one of the important basis for creditors to judge enterprise uncertainty and evaluate credit risk.As an important part of enterprise environmental information,the importance of carbon information is self-evident.Enterprises can fully disclose the carbon information through annual reports,social responsibility reports or sustainable development reports to alleviate the problem of information asymmetry between enterprises and creditors.On the one hand,The disclosure of carbon information can meet the needs of stakeholders.On the other hand,it can effectively alleviate the information asymmetry between the creditors and the enterprise,reduce risk prediction of creditors,thereby reducing the cost of debt financing of the enterprise.So,the paper puts forward hypothesis H1: The disclosure of carbon information is negatively correlated with the cost of debt.With the improvement of environmental regulations,the creditors 'sensitivity to the environment information is enhanced,which will affect their risk perception of the enterprise,.According to matching principle of risks and benefits,it will affect the expected return.So,the paper puts forward hypothesis H2: Environmental regulation can strengthen the relationship between carbon information disclosure and cost of debt.To verify the above hypotheses,the paper uses content analysis method to construct the evaluation system of carbon disclosure,the interest payments accounted for the cost of debt,China pollution supervision information disclosure index(PITI)as a measure of environmental regulation.collecting data from heavy polluting listed companies of A-share in Shanghai Stock Exchange from 2014 to 2016.Based on the control of relevant variables,the paper uses Stata13 to carry out OLS regression analysis,the results show that:(1)The disclosure of carbon information is negatively correlated with the cost of debt;(2)Environmental regulation can strengthen the relationship between disclosure of carbon information and cost of debt.Also,it is found that the negative correlation between carbon disclosure and cost of debt is more significant in private enterprises,and the strengthening effect about environmental regulations is more significant in private enterprises.The research on environmental regulation,disclosure of carbon information and the cost of debt has certain value to improve the theoretical research of economic consequences of carbon information disclosure.As China's economy has entered a new norm,the heavy pollution industry is facing overcapacity and other unfavorable factors,this paper can provide the reference for the heavy pollution industry to reduce the cost of debt.Also this paper can help the government to understand the disclosure of carbon,provide some empirical evidence to launch relevant laws to improve the disclosure of carbon.