Environmental Information Disclosure,Corporate Reputation And Debt Financing Capacity

With the frequent occurrence of environmental problems in recent years,it has seriously influenced social and economic development and the quality of life of citizens.Environmental degradation poses a serious threat to the sustainable growth of the global economy.Governments are currently facing various environmental disasters almost daily,including air and water pollution,desertification,a sharp decline in biodiversity and rapid population growth and urbanization increasing the environmental pressure.Governments and companies are actively taking measures to reduce the possibility and the harm of environmental problems.Environmental information disclosure is one of the measures.On one hand,it regulates the companies’ environmental protection behavior,at the same time,it introduces external stakeholders to supervise the company to assume environmental protection responsibilities and fulfill environmental protection obligations;on the other hand,the degree of information asymmetry between the internal managers and external stakeholders is reduced,and stakeholders can make decisions accurately.Therefore,scholars at home and abroad have started to study environmental information disclosure.At present,research on environmental information disclosure is not very mature.The economic consequences of environmental information disclosure are mainly focused on empirical research on the impact on corporate performance,corporate value,and financing,and the relationship between environmental information disclosure and financing especially more focused on the impact on financing costs.To some extent,the disclosure of environmental information can alleviate the information asymmetry between the internal managers and external stakeholders.However,currently external stakeholders have great difficulties in directly and accurately obtaining the environmental information disclosed by the company.According to reputation information theory,we can know that corporate reputation can be used as a tool to convey information.When external stakeholders cannot judge the disclosure of environmental information,corporate reputation may have some impact on stakeholders’ judgment.Based on this,from the perspective of corporate reputation,this paper explores the relationship between environmental information disclosure and its debt financing capabilities and the path of influence.Firstly,we conduct a literature review of environmental information disclosure,corporate reputation,and debt financing capabilities and clarify the current status of relevant research and to sort out the research framework of this paper.Then,introduce the stakeholder theory,the information asymmetry theory,the signal transmission theory,the priority financing theory,and the reputation information theory,and use these theories to explore the relationship and impact path between environmental information disclosure and debt financing capacity from the perspective of corporate reputation,and put forward the following three hypotheses: the level of environmental information disclosure is positively related to debt financing capacity;the level of environmental information disclosure is positively related to corporate reputation;corporate reputation partially mediates the relationship between environmental information disclosure and debt financing capacity.Finally,based on the existing literature research,a measurement system for environmental information disclosure level,a comprehensive corporate reputation measurement system,and a debt financing capability measurement index are constructed.Using SPSS24,we conduct a multiple regression analysis on a total of 5361 observations of listed companies in the heavily polluting industry on the A-share of Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchange in 2010-2018 to verify the hypotheses proposed.Through empirical research,we got:(1)At present,the level of environmental information disclosure in the heavily polluting industries varies widely.No company can achieve 100% disclose the environmental information,which indicates that the current laws and regulations are still insufficient,and companies will selectively disclose environmental information.(2)The degree of environmental information disclosure in China’s heavily polluting industries has a significant positive correlation with the corporate debt financing capacity,that is,the higher the degree of corporate environmental information disclosure,the stronger the company’s debt financing capacity,and the more debt financing it can get.(3)The level of environmental information disclosure in China’s heavily polluting industries has a significant positive correlation with corporate reputation,that is,the higher the degree of corporate environmental information disclosure,the better the corporate reputation.(4)Corporate reputation partially mediates the relationship between environmental information disclosure and debt financing capacity in China’s heavily polluting industries,that is,part of the company’s disclosure of environmental information directly affects corporate debt financing capability,and partly it affects debt financing capability by affecting its reputation.This paper enriches the research on environmental information disclosure,corporate reputation,and debt financing capability.At the same time,it tries to put forward some targeted suggestions in order to improve the level of environmental information disclosure and alleviate the "financing difficulties" of enterprises to some extent.