The Unintended Effect Of Mandatory CSR Report

On the one hand,unlike the voluntary issuance of social responsibility reports(CSR reports)by early enterprises for some motive,governments have gradually required enterprises to fulfill their social responsibility and issue CSR reports through the implementation of mandatory policies since the 1990 s.Usually,academics mainly focus on how mandatory disclosure of CSR impacts firm and social.On the other hand,with the improvement of the external information environment of enterprises,investors and stakeholders increasingly regard the information obtained from news reports as an important reference basis for their own decision-making,and media already became an important supervisor for enterprises.At the same time,enterprises have gradually learned to manage their own media image in order to improve their visibility and gain greater benefits.However,the impact of mandatory CSR reports on corporate media image has not yet been explored.Based on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and Shenzhen Stock Exchange of China require some enterprises to disclose their CSR reports since 2008",this paper mainly uses the difference-in-differences(DID)model and the propensity score matching(PSM)method to analyze the influence of mandatory disclosure of CSR to the image of enterprises and make some proposes.This paper finds that the increase of negative news in the experimental group(enterprises subject to mandatory policy constraints)is significantly higher than that in the control group(enterprises not subject to mandatory policy constraints).And negative news will increases more if the company has disclosed the insufficient in their mandatory CSR reports.These shows that as one of the important non-financial information of enterprises,mandatory CSR reports reduce the information asymmetry between enterprises and stakeholders or the news media.After the public and journalists get more effective information from mandatory CSR reports,the negative news of enterprises has increased significantly and their media image has change a lot.In addition,this paper finds that the changes of companies' media image i.e.the increase of negative annual news are very different due to the diverse quality of mandatory CSR reports.Taking the two characteristics of female executives and irregularities as the criteria for dividing enterprises into sub-samples and bring the sub-samples into the difference-in-differences(DID)model.The results of comparison and regression are as follows: compared with non-female executives and irregularities enterprises,there are more negative news and more changes in media image for the samples of female executives and irregularities enterprises after they issued mandatory social responsibility reports.The above results confirm that under the impact of the mandatory policy,the mandatory csr reports issued by enterprises have a significant impact on their own media image.Through this study can provide empirical evidence for enterprises to fully understand the impact of such mandatory policies on themselves and provide some suggestions for relevant departments to improve such policies in the future.