Managerial Self-serving Incentives And Strategic Social Responsibility Information Disclosure

At the same time of rapid economic development,various social problems occurred,such as environmental pollution,food safety scandals and production accidents As result,the public from all walks of life wish public companies to take over social responsibility and develop in a more sustainable way.As the main carrier of corporate social responsibility(CSR)information,CSR report is highly appreciated by stakeholders.Under the pressure of all parties,more and more companies begin to disclose CSR reports separately.In theory,this will allow investors to learn the performance of corporate social responsibility in time,thus improving the information environment of the capital market.However,some empirical studies came to the opposite conclusion.The results predict that the disclosure of social responsibility report only aggravates the risk of capital market.So it's essential to learn the real motivation of enterprises to disclose social responsibility information.As the actual decision maker of the disclosure of CSR information,is the information disclosure decision of the executives affected by their own interests motivations? From the perspective of insider sales we exam the possible influence of the interest motivation of senior managers on the disclosure of CSR information.First of all,we choose two variables to measure the self-interested motivation.One is a dummy variable,which equals one when the senior managers sell stocks in the 30 trading days after the issuance of CSR report,and equals 0 otherwise.The other one equals the scale of insider sales.Secondly,in order to rule out other possibilities,we further investigate whether the relationship of insider sales and level of CSR report differs in corporate under different external and internal regulatory pressure.Finally,we examine whether the industry feature affect the relationship between the self-interest motivation of senior managers and the level of disclosure of corporate social responsibility information.The results show that:(1)The tendency to sell shares dealing scales are associates with higher level of CSR information disclosure.The result indicates that senior managers try to disclosure more CSR information to cater to investors' preference before insider sales.In addition,the tendency increases with the deal size.(2)The positive relationship between insider sales and the level of CSR report is stronger in companies with lower institutional ownership proportion and poor corporate governance and in non-auditing groups.This finding further verify the strategic disclosure hypothesis.(3)The above results are more pronounced in the listed companies in the heavy-polluted industries.The main reason lies in that investors pay more attention to the CSR information of companies in heavy-polluted industries.We provide a setting in which senior managers disclosure CSR information strategically,thus enriching and expanding the empirical studies in the field of CSR information disclosure.On the one hand,our study can help investors understand the real motivation of senior managers to disclosure CSR information in China.On the other hand,our study is enlightening for regulators to supervise the CSR information disclosure.