Research On The Relationship Between Environmental Information Regulation And The Risk Of Stock Price Crash

With the deterioration of environment and the public’s attention to environmental issues,information disclosure-based environmental regulation is gradually developing,our government has also issued numerous rules and regulations to establish and improve the system of environmental information disclosure,environmental information has become an important part of enterprise information disclosure.In December 2017,the CSRC issued Documents No.2 and No.3 of the revised guidelines on the content and format of information disclosure of listed companies,the guidelines clearly require listed companies and subsidiaries as key polluters to make mandatory disclosure of environmental information from 2017,and specify annual and semi-annual reports as their disclosure carriers.The revised guidelines enhance the standardization and punishment of environmental information disclosure,showing the regulatory attitude towards environmental information disclosure.This paper refers to the CSRC’s mandatory environmental information disclosure requirements for listed companies in 2017 as environmental information regulation.Its main purpose is to make public the environmental issues in the operation of listed companies through mandatory disclosure,improve the environmental information transparency of enterprises and increase the cost of environmental violations of enterprises.However,under the environmental information regulation policy,can the environmental information that enterprises are forced to disclose be effectively interpreted by the public? This article will focus on the risk of stock price crash as a research perspective,focusing on the study and discussion of the stock market effects caused by the implementation of environmental information regulation policy.Based the environmental information regulation policy,this paper constructs a quasi-natural experiment,and clarifies the theory of the impact of environmental information regulation on the risk of stock price crash,selectes the data of2010-2021 A-share listed companies,with key polluters as the experimental group and non-key polluters as the control group,this paper empirically tests the relationship between the regulation of environmental information and the risk of stock price crash by choosing the Differences-in-Differences model,the paper also discusses the moderating effect of the heterogeneity between the two types of environmental protection input.On this basis,this paper further introduces the property right nature,agency cost and accounting information transparency as grouping variables.The results show that the relationship between environmental information regulation and the risk of stock price crash is different among different property rights,accounting information transparency and agency cost.The results show that:(1)Environmental information regulation significantly increases the risk of stock price crash.(2)The positive correlation between environmental information regulation and the risk of stock price crash is moderated by the heterogeneity of environmental protection input,the positive correlation between environmental information regulation and the risk of stock price crash is enhanced by the increase of the level of expense-oriented environmental protection input,while the investment-oriented environmental protection input will not have a significant influence on the relationship between the two.(3)Heterogeneity analysis showed that,the aggravating effect of environmental information regulation on the risk of stock price crash is more obvious in the state-owned enterprises,the enterprises with high agency cost and low transparency of accounting information.(4)After a series of robustness tests,such as PSM-DID Test,Parallel Trend Test,Placebo Test and Changing the Mode of Measurement of the Risk of Stock Price Crash,the conclusion of this paper is still valid.Finally,this paper puts forward the following suggestions from three perspectives:(1)Government should strengthen the top-level design of environmental information disclosure as soon as possible.Meanwhile,the government should pay more attention to the education and guidance of investors,so as to avoid the investors’ fear caused by the tightening of environmental policies.(2)Enterprises should actively undertake environmental responsibilities,build good corporate reputation and enhance their competitiveness through targeted,conscious and focused strategic environmental investment and high-quality environmental information disclosure.(3)While paying attention to the financial information,investors should also take the current environmental policy and the environmental responsibility performance of enterprises as the important indicators,and make the best investment decision after making the overall and reasonable assessment.