Media Attention,Executive Incentive And Corporate Environmental Information Disclosure

With the development of green economy,a great number of enterprises are participating in the wave of energy conservation and environmental protection in order to build an environment-friendly society.The environmental information disclosure,an indicator to measure the environmental performance of enterprises,has come into being and its importance also become more and more prominent.How to improve the level of environmental information disclosure becomes a topic of common concern in academic circles and practice circles.From the perspective of external governance,media coverage will reduce asymmetric information between enterprises and the public,which urges enterprises to disclose comprehensive and timely environmental information and enhances the enthusiasm of enterprises to take environmental responsibility.From the analysis of the internal governance mechanism,the right to disclose information depends largely on manager.Executive incentives are an effective method to constrain the behavior of managers and improve the quality of voluntary information disclosure including environmental information.At the same time,executive incentives,a kind of corporate internal governance mechanism,will be affected by external media attention.Therefore,it is of great significance to study the relationship among media attention,executive incentive and environmental information disclosure for strengthening corporate environmental responsibility and promoting the development of green economy.This thesis investigates the impact of media attention and executive incentive on environmental information disclosure,and analyzes how the media attention and executive incentive together to affect environmental information disclosure.By selecting the listed companies in heavy polluting industry of A-Share market of Shanghai Stock Exchange(observation period between 2014-2016)as research samples,empirical tests are conducted based on media governance theory,principal-agent theory,legality theory and stakeholder theory.The empirical results show that:(1)media plays a role in corporate governance,and the media coverage on the corporate environmental performance is conducive to promoting corporate environmental information disclosure.(2)There is a significant positive correlation between executive compensation incentive,executive share incentive,and corporate environmental information disclosure,that is,executive incentive can significantly improve corporate environmental information disclosure.(3)Correlation between executive compensation incentive and environmental information disclosure will be lessened by media attention.Media attention has the same influence on the correlation between executive share incentive and environmental information disclosure.When media coverage increases,even if the executive incentive mechanism is not implemented,managers will also disclose more environmental information for their own occupational safety and long-term interests because of reputation mechanism and public pressure.Therefore,the effect of the executive incentive mechanism will be weakened.On the contrary,less media attention leads to stronger positive correlation between executive incentive and corporate environmental information disclosure.From the perspective of internal and external corporate governance,this thesis incorporates media attention,executive incentives and corporate environmental information disclosure into a research framework,and examines general impact of external media attention and internal executive incentive on corporate environmental information disclosure,which riches the research on information disclosure and provides experience support for the development of green accounting.