Study On Environmental Regulation,Environmental Information Disclosure And Debt Financing

In recent years,environmental issues have attracted more and more people’s attention.Traditional environmental control methods mainly include the formulation of environmental standards,related laws and regulations,and administrative and economic penalties for enterprises that violate regulations.In this case,the company is mainly regulated by external policies,and the company lacks the motivation to improve the environmental level from within.Combining environmental factors with finance to guide enterprises to improve environmental levels spontaneously has become the future management direction for environmental issues.Since the release of the Equator Principles,more and more financial institutions will consider the impact of environmental factors on business operations when approving loans.In 2007,regarding the corporate environmental factors in credit approval,China issued the "Opinions on Implementing Environmental Protection Policies and Regulations to Prevent Credit Risks".For the first time,financial institutions are required to strictly examine and approve loans,supervise and manage credit approvals.and disapproval projects that have not passed environmental impact assessment.At present,there is no official environmental information disclosure platform in China.Enterprises often disclose environmental information in some sections of the annual report or the separately issued social responsibility report.These reports become an important source of information for external assessment of corporate environmental risks.Under the background of the progressive development of green credit,it is of great significance to study the impact of corporate environmental information disclosure on debt financing.Based on the 2014-2016 enterprise data of heavy polluting industry.this paper quantifies corporate debt financing in two perspectives:debt financing scale and financing costs,based on stakeholder theory,information asymmetry theory,signal theory and legality theory.This paper mainly discuss four problems:whether corporate environmental information disclosure affects the scale of corporate debt financing and whether it affects corporate debt financing costs.Secondly,there are differences in environmental disclosure levels among different industries,and whether the correlation between environmental information disclosure levels and debt financing can be established in different industries.Whether the intensity of environmental regulation in the city where the enterprise is located has an impact on the disclosure of corporate environmental information;and finally whether the intensity of environmental regulation has an impact on the correlation between environmental information disclosure and corporate debt financing.After the empirical analysis,it is concluded that in the industries with higher environmental information disclosure scores such as metallurgy and chemical industry.the increase of corporate disclosure level has increased the credit scale of enterprises and has a significant effect on reducing the financing cost of corporate debt.Disclosure of industries with low index,such as textile and pharmaceutical manufacturing,environmental information disclosure and corporate debt financing scale and cost are not significantly related,reflecting the difference in environmental information disclosure levels of different industries in China,and the development of green credit among industries has a difference.In addition,in areas with strong environmental regulations,due to institutional constraints.corporate environmental information disclosure is relatively complete.Environmental regulation can also strengthen the correlation between environmental information disclosure and debt financing.In areas with strong environmental regulations.improving environmental information levels can more effectively reduce debt financing costs.In the past,the research on environmental information disclosure and debt financing was mainly based on a single industry or a mixture of all industries.This paper examines the sub-industry and enriches the application mechanism of environmental information disclosure for debt financing in different industries,and provides the future implementation of green credit policy reference.This paper also introduces environmental regulation factors,enriching the research content in the field of environmental information disclosure and debt financing.At the same time,there are also some shortcomings in this paper.Since the environmental information disclosure data of this paper is taken from Fudan University’s "Enterprise Environmental Information Disclosure Index Report",some industry data samples are small,and it is not possible to conduct a comprehensive analysis of all heavily polluting industries.