Media Attention, Corporate Governance And Environmental Information Disclosure

The report of the 18 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China put forwardthe general layout of the "five in one" for the first time.Focusing on building a well-offsociety in an all-round way is inseparable from five aspects of economic,political,cultural,social and ecological civilization construction.In the past 40 years of reform and opening up,China's modernization process has developed rapidly,but environmental problems have also arisen.Enterprises as the main body of production and operation activities,especially heavy polluting enterprises,have become the main factors of environmental pollution.In addition,China's current environmental information disclosure system is not perfect,many companies are reluctant to disclose the true and specific situation of corporate environmental information,and are unwilling to take the initiative.Social responsibility makes it impossible for allsectors of society,especially stakeholders,to objectively understand the real situation of the enterprise.Under this background,China's research on the factors affecting the level of environmental information disclosure has begun to increase,and has attracted the attention of many scholars.Studying the influence of media attention and corporate governance on the level of environmental information disclosure is conducive to providing advice from both external and internal aspects to improve the quality of environmental information disclosure,and has practical research significance.This paper reviews the research methods and results of relevant literatures at home and abroad,and uses public stress theory,principal-agent theory,information asymmetry theory and social responsibility theory as the theoretical basis to open up new perspectives and propose theresearch hypothesisbased on the current research status.The heavily polluting enterprises listed in the national A-share market were selected as the research object,and the framework of media attention,corporate governance and environmental information disclosure level was constructed.Based on the hypothesis,the test model was established to conduct empirical analysis on the data of 105 sample companies from 2013 to 2017.Media attention and corporate governance are related to the level of environmental information disclosure,and media attention is used as a regulatory variable to further explore whether it has a regulatory effect on the relationship between corporate governance and environmental information disclosure.Through the descriptive statistics,correlation analysis,multiple regression results and robustness test of the main variables,the empirical research conclusions of this paper are as follows:(1)The media attention has a significant positive correlation with the level of corporate environmental information disclosure.Media attention is an external supervision of enterprises.Therefore,companies with higher media attention will be more inclined to disclose their environmental information more actively considering their reputation and development.(2)Corporate governance is significantly and positively related to the level of corporate environmental information disclosure,and media attention can positively adjust its impact on environmental information disclosure.The concentration of equity,the number of board meetings and executive compensation are all positively related to the level of environmental information disclosure.Further explore the regulatory effects of media attention.It is found that media attention can positively relate to the number of board meetings,executive compensation and environmental information disclosure and have regulating effect.Finally,based on the research conclusions,corresponding suggestions are put forward.