Quality Of Environmental Information Disclosure,Media Attention And Cost Of Debt Financing

Along with our country economy growing at the same time,environmental pollution problems appeared gradually,the environmental pollution for the sustainable development of economy and the human physical and mental health caused great threat,has become the government and the concern of the society,therefore needs joint efforts of the government,enterprises and society three aspects to coordinate the balance of economic development and environmental protection.In the game between enterprise pollution and governance,people find that the contradiction can be alleviated through environmental information disclosure.Enterprises take the initiative to disclose environmental information,improve the transparency of enterprises,so that banks and other financial institutions can have a comprehensive understanding of corporate information,reduce the time and cost for creditors to collect corporate information and understand corporate behavior,and then reduce debt financing costs.In competition with each other,enterprises regard the process of environmental information disclosure as a game,and constantly improve the quality of environmental information disclosure to attract external financing.At the same time,the government is also making relevant laws and regulations to constraining the environmental behavior of enterprises.In 2016,China issued the Guidelines on Establishing a Green Financial System(hereinafter referred to as the Guidelines).Companies should take the initiative to disclose environmental information,and the state will impose mandatory measures on companies that fail to truthfully disclose information or manipulate or tamper with environmental information,the guideline said.In order to implement the green credit policy,the government encourages enterprises to conduct green financing,and advocates financial institutions or other non-financial organizations to relax the financing conditions for cleaner production enterprises,reduce the loan interest rate and increase the amount of financing.The Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China,promulgated in May 2020,stipulates that if a violation of state regulations causes damage to the ecological environment,state organs or organizations prescribed by law have the right to claim compensation for losses and expenses from the infringer,and stresses the importance of ecological protection.In addition,the media can arouse government intervention and public opinion,and make good use of social power to supervise enterprises’ environmental behaviors and information disclosure,so as to reduce enterprises’ non-standard production.Media use its function of information transmission to disseminate the financial information and operating conditions of enterprises,so that investors can learn the information of good quality of enterprises,and then invest in enterprises.This paper attempts to study the impact of internal environmental information disclosure quality and external media attention on corporate debt financing costs.In this paper,heavy polluting enterprises listed in A-share market are taken as the research object,and the data from 2016 to 2018 are selected.Because the production activities of heavy polluting enterprises have A great impact on the environment,they are more representative than other industries.By combing domestic and foreign literature and relevant theories,the fixed effect model is used to study the relationship among corporate debt financing cost,media attention and environmental information disclosure quality.The results show that the enterprises with higher quality of environmental information disclosure can significantly reduce their debt financing costs.Compared with the non-monetary environmental information,the monetary environmental information can reduce the debt financing costs of heavy polluting enterprises more.The negative relationship between environmental information quality and debt financing cost of non-state-owned enterprises is stronger than that of state-owned enterprises for heavy polluters with different equity properties.The linear adjustment effect of the amount of media coverage on the quality of environmental information disclosure and corporate debt financing cost is not significant,but there is a significant U-shaped adjustment effect.The positive media coverage has little effect on the negative correlation between the quality of environmental information disclosure and debt financing cost.Negative media reports can weaken the negative relationship between the quality of environmental information disclosure and corporate debt financing costs.According to the empirical results,policy suggestions are put forward from three aspects: government,media and enterprises.