Government Supervision, Internal Governance Structure And Environmental Information Disclosure

Environmental resources are the prerequisite and basic conditions for the existence and development of human society.During the last few decades,China has made great achievements in the field of economic construction.Behind the high-speed development of economy is the huge environmental debt produced during the early stage of industrialization.Environmental pollution,ecological deterioration and resource constraints have become obstacles on the road of sustainable development of Chinese economy.Serious environmental problems and increasingly improving awareness of environmental protection of the public push Chinese government to raise the new concept of green development.And environmental supervision has been continuously enhanced.As the microcosmic subject of social economy,enterprise production is the main source of environmental pollution,which should bear the social responsibility of environmental protection.The environmental information disclosure system provides enterprises with ways to maintain stakeholder relationships,and it also can serve as an important channel for the social public to supervise corporate environmental behavior.The establishment of environmental information disclosure system in our country came relatively late,the overall performance of environmental information disclosure from enterprises is quite poor,producing a huge imbalance between the supply and demand of environmental information.In order to transform the economic development mode and imply the concept of green development,it is urgent to complete the information disclosure system.Enterprises themselves need to improve the level of environmental information disclosure.A good internal governance structure can not only guarantee the smooth operation of the enterprise,realize the interests of the investors,but also clarify the relationship between the enterprise and the external stakeholders,creating a harmonious and win-win relationship among the various stakeholders.From the perspective of final goal,upgrading the internal governance structure of enterprises and improving the level of environmental information disclosure have internal consistency.Under this circumstance,it is necessary to study the relationship between government supervision,corporate internal governance structure and environmental information disclosure.It can not only provide a basis for the establishment and improvement of environmental information disclosure systems,but help to provide more information for the development of green financial system.Firstly,this paper reviews the existing literatures at home and abroad,summarizes the current situation of the research,pointing out the deficiency of current research.Based on the legitimacy theory,principal-agent theory and stakeholder theory,we put forward the hypotheses of this paper.We try to verify the hypothesis with the data from enterprises of heavy pollution industry from Shanghai Stock Exchange.This paper is composed of five parts;The first part describes the environmental problems faced by our country,expounding the background and topics of the paper.Then,the significance of the research is discussed.The last part points out the methods and main innovations of this paper.The second part summarizes the domestic and foreign literature from three angles:factors affecting the quality of environmental information disclosure,government supervision and environmental information disclosure,internal governance structure and environmental information disclosure.The third part defines the main concepts of this article,reviews the theory of legitimacy,principal-agent theory,stakeholder theory and so on.It also presents the reasonable hypothesis on the relationship between government supervision,internal governance structure and environmental information disclosure,providing theoretical support for the empirical research in this paper.The fourth part describes an empirical test.This chapter describes the source and selection principles of the samples,presents the regression model,and defines the main variables in the model,quantifies the government supervision,internal governance structure and the level of enterprise environmental information disclosure,verifying the relationship between the three.At last,the robustness of the model is inspected.The last part analyzes the results of empirical research,and puts forward pertinent suggestions based on the main conclusions of the empirical study.Finally,according to the problems encountered in the writing and research process,the limitations of this paper are pointed out,showing the direction for further study.The research shows that the level of environmental information disclosure from listed companies in heavy pollution industries is not optimistic and there is still a lot of room for improvement.In terms of internal governance structure,concentration of equity,separation of the positions of chairman and general manager,and expansion of the scale of independent directors can significantly improve the level of environmental information disclosure.The enhancement of government supervision can strengthen the effect of above factors to improve the quality of information disclosure.There is a positive relationship between the number of board of supervisors.management share-holding and the level of information disclosure,but it is not significant.There are mainly two aspects of the innovation and contribution of this article:firstly,the existing literature usually selects different factors from the single dimension of external governance or internal governance to investigate the impact on the quality of enterprise environmental information disclosure.There is no clear and adequate answer to the relationship between the two mechanisms.On the basis of theoretical analysis,this paper combines the two governance mechanisms to study whether the different levels of government supervision will cause changes in the direction and extent of the internal governance influence on the disclosure of enterprise environmental information.It can not only broaden the research perspective of enterprise environmental information disclosure,but also provide a theoretical basis for the government to improve the efficiency of environmental policy implementation.Secondly,in the measurement of the level of government supervision,this paper adopts PITI index.It not only contains the differences in the level of government supervision caused by the promulgation and implementation of the system,but also considers the different levels of local supervision,expanding the dimension of government supervision.The inadequacies of the article are mainly reflected in two aspects:few sample data and low goodness of fit of the model.In the future research,we can improve the study from the way of sample selection,and variable selection to enhance the applicability of the conclusion.