The Influence Of Environmental Information Disclosure Quality On Debt Cost Of Heavily Polluting Enterprises

With the rise of the concept of sustainable development and the vigorous practice of the construction of ecological civilization in China,more and more attention has been paid to the environmental performance and environmental responsibility of heavily polluting enterprises.Especially in recent years,under the influence of Green Credit Policies and Green Financial Policy,the relationship between corporate environmental protection and debt financing has become closer,at the same time,because of information asymmetry,environmental information disclosed by enterprises is increasingly becoming the key factor for creditors to understand the environmental risks of enterprises and then influence their debt financing decisions.However,the overall level of environmental information disclosure of Chinese enterprises is not good.Information fragmentation and low substantive characteristics are serious,such as avoiding key information and lack of quantitative explanation.Such environmental information is difficult to provide effective decision-making reference for creditors,and therefore creditors gradually shift their attention from “quantity” to “quality” of environmental information disclosures.To this end,various stakeholders began to exert pressure on enterprises to promote enterprises to pay attention to the quality of information disclosure.Therefore,whether the quality of enterprise environmental disclosure can affect corporate debt financing and how,and whether institutional pressure can effectively promote the relationship between the quality of environmental information disclosure and the cost of debt of heavily polluting enterprises is still worthy of in-depth study.Based on the institutional background of China,this thesis deeply analyzes the relationship between the quality of environmental information disclosure,institutional pressure and corporate debt cost based on institutional theory,stakeholder theory,information asymmetry theory and signaling theory.This thesis selects A-share heavily polluting companies listed on Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges from 2012 to 2020 as the research samples and investigates the impact of the quality of environmental information disclosure on the cost of corporate debt considering the moderating effects of institutional pressures.Moreover,this thesis examines the influences of different types of ownership given that different types of ownership may affect the judgment of creditors to a great extent.The thesis finds that:(1)improving the quality of environmental information disclosure can significantly reduce the cost of debt.(2)after dividing environmental information into different types,the thesis identifies that the effect of “hard disclosure” on reducing the cost of corporate debt tends to be stronger than “soft disclosure”.(3)coercive pressure and normative pressure can positively moderate the negative correlation between the quality of environmental information disclosure and debt cost of heavily polluting enterprises,while the moderating effect of imitative institutional pressure is weak in the short term,but the moderating effect will appear gradually with the extension of time.(4)comparing with stateowned enterprises,the quality of environmental information disclosure has a more significant effect on reducing the debt cost in non-state-owned enterprises with heavy pollution.Based on the above conclusions,this thesis puts forward policy recommendations for the enterprises and government respectively,including improving enterprises’ consciousness of environmental protection,improving the internal environmental management mechanism,strengthening the government’s supervision over the environmental information disclosure of enterprises,strengthening the supervision role of environmental protection organizations,standardizing the order of market development and so on.