Environmental Regulation,legal Background Of Executives And Corporate Environmental Information Disclosure

In recent years,the awareness of environmental protection among Chinese enterprises has been increasing,but environmental pollution incidents have occurred from time to time.In the market environment of rapid economic development and increasingly fierce competition,many enterprises still pursue economic benefits at the expense of the environment.Unlike enterprises,the government has formulated a series of environmental regulations to regulate the environmental behavior of enterprises in order to promote green and low-carbon economic and social development and achieve high-quality development.The 2015 Law of the People’s Republic of China on Environmental Protection(hereinafter referred to as the new Environmental Protection Law)has been further improved on the basis of the 1989 version,featuring the synergy between economic development and ecological protection,and highlighting the government’s supervisory function in environmental governance,clarifying the public’s power to participate in environmental governance,and increasing the penalties for non-compliant enterprises.The introduction of the new Environmental Protection Law will certainly have an impact on corporate environmental behavior,and the new Environmental Protection Law has certain requirements for corporate environmental information disclosure.Environmental information disclosure provides a channel for stakeholders to understand the environmental behavior of enterprises,and makes the costs and benefits of environmental responsibility known to the public.Therefore,it is necessary to investigate the mechanism and impact of the new Environmental Protection Law on environmental information disclosure.At the same time,executives play an important role in corporate decision making.This paper takes into account the role of executives’ legal background and explores the mechanism of the role between the three.The new Environmental Protection Law provides a quasi-natural experimental setting for judging the intensity of environmental regulations on the level of environmental information disclosure by firms in the heavy pollution industry.This paper uses public pressure theory,high-level echelon theory,legitimacy theory,and social responsibility theory as the theoretical basis,and uses the new Environmental Protection Law as an exogenous shock to explore the changes in the level of environmental information disclosure of enterprises before and after the implementation of the new Environmental Protection Law by adopting a high-dimensional fixed-effects double-difference model with Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies in the heavy pollution industry as the research sample from2012-2021.The influence of executives’ legal background on corporate environmental information disclosure is also considered,and the two are further combined to explore how executives’ legal background plays a moderating effect in the relationship between the role of the new Environmental Protection Law on corporate environmental information disclosure.The robustness test section uses placebo test,replacement variable and propensity score matching method to verify the previous results.The path of the effect of the new Environmental Protection Law on corporate environmental information disclosure is explored in further analysis,and different regions and property rights nature are grouped.The conclusions are as follows: the new Environmental Protection Law has a facilitating effect on corporate environmental information disclosure,especially for key pollution monitoring units;the legal background of executives has a facilitating effect on corporate environmental information disclosure;and the new Environmental Protection Law and the legal background of executives have a substituting effect in promoting corporate environmental information disclosure.The results of further analysis show that the new Environmental Protection Law can achieve its facilitating effect on environmental information disclosure by promoting green innovation and strengthening internal control of enterprises;the facilitating effect of the new Environmental Protection Law on corporate environmental information disclosure is only apparent in the eastern region and among non-state enterprises.