The Impact Of Carbon Information Disclosure On The Cost Of Capital

Global warming has become a subject of common concern all over the world.The phrases "carbon neutral" and"carbon peak" also appear many times in China’s government work report in 2021.As an important part of economic and social development,enterprises are the main source of greenhouse gas emissions.We regard corporate carbon information disclosure as an observation window for enterprises to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.If it is confirmed that high-quality carbon information disclosure can reduce the cost of capital,it may provide internal motivation for enterprises to actively take carbon emission reduction actions and carbon information disclosure.This paper mainly studies the relationship between carbon information disclosure and capital cost.We select the enterprises A-share listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchangers from 2010 to 2018 as the research object-After sorting out the entire process of corporate carbon emission reduction management activities,we built our own evaluation indicators for carbon information disclosure.The main findings of this paper are as follows:(1)Through the research on corporate capital cost,we found that high-quality corporate carbon information disclosure will reduce corporate capital cost.After that,we use Confucian culture and whether the city where the enterprise is located is a low-carbon pilot city as instrumental variables to test the endogeneity.The results prove that our previous regression results are robust.(2)Corporate carbon information disclosure ultimately affects the cost of capital through two intermediary channels:social responsibility performance and corporate financing constraints.(3)The implementation of carbon emission reduction action and carbon emission disclosure in the evaluation index of enterprise carbon information disclosure will significantly reduce the cost of capital.However,we do not find significant relationship between carbon emission reduction performance and weighted average cost of capital.(4)The disclosure of corporate carbon information will bring about positive externalities.If the quality of a company’s carbon information disclosure is higher,the province’s carbon dioxide emissions will be lower.