A Study On The Impact Of Environmental Information Disclosure On The Cost Of Corporate Credit Financing

At present,China’s reform and opening up has stepped over the "shallow water" of crossing the river by touching the stones and entered the "deep water" of fast flowing water.In the20 th Party Congress,it was proposed that nature is the basic condition for human beings to survive and develop,and that we should continue to promote green development and plan development in a harmonious coexistence between human beings and nature.Needless to say,in the past economic development,we have made a series of measures that damage the ecological environment and are not conducive to sustainable development in order to achieve high-speed economic leap,but in the current stage of high-quality growth,we have fully realized the importance of environmental protection and attach great importance to environmental protection in terms of strategy,in which the environmental information disclosure system can be said to have come into being,in the past,the government,banks and other In the past,financial institutions and the public mostly focused on the financial information of enterprises,and on indicators such as operating ability,solvency and growth ability of enterprises,but in the context of the environmental information disclosure system,various stakeholders gradually included the environmental information of enterprises into the audit.Meanwhile,in 2012,the CBRC issued the Green Credit Guidelines,which put forward green credit for the first time and required commercial banks to include enterprises’ environmental information in credit assessment when conducting loan business.In this context,this paper analyzes the impact of environmental information disclosure policy on the credit financing cost of enterprises from the perspective of enterprises by selecting 2011-2019 Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed heavy polluters,and analyzes the development evolution of environmental information disclosure policy and green credit policy and heavy polluters based on information asymmetry theory,stakeholder theory,signaling theory and socio-political theory.By constructing a time-industry fixed-effects model,we empirically test the effect of environmental information disclosure on corporate credit financing,and analyze the mediating utility of debt default risk and commercial credit,and apply the two-stage least squares method to test the endogeneity and replace the explanatory variables for robustness.Finally,the heterogeneity analysis of environmental information disclosure on corporate credit financing costs is analyzed in a multidimensional manner by grouping the firms according to their internal conditions,i.e.,the nature of property rights and the level of internal control,and their external environment,i.e.,the level of marketization and the degree of government regulation.The main conclusions of this paper are as follows:(1)the status quo of environmental information disclosure in China has improved year by year,but there are still problems such as incomplete disclosure content,poor willingness to disclose,and non-independent disclosure carriers;(2)environmental information disclosure can improve the financing situation of heavy polluting enterprises and has a significant contribution to the cost of credit financing;(3)debt default risk and commercial credit play a role in the quality of environmental information disclosure of heavy polluting enterprises on the cost of credit(3)debt default risk and commercial credit play part of the mediating utility in the effect of environmental information disclosure quality of heavy pollution enterprises on credit financing cost;(4)the effect of environmental information disclosure quality of heavy pollution enterprises on credit financing cost will be different in different internal conditions of enterprises and different external environment,and the effect of state-owned enterprises is more significant than non-state-owned enterprises,enterprises with high level of internal control,higher level of marketization in the location,and strict government regulation.Based on the above findings,this paper makes recommendations from three levels of government,enterprises,and society in multiple dimensions:(1)for the government,first,at the legislative level,to strengthen the top-level design of environmental information disclosure,second,at the law enforcement level to strengthen the government’s environmental regulatory capacity,and third,to deepen the market-oriented institutional reform;(2)for enterprises,first,to raise awareness of environmental protection and actively fulfill their environmental responsibilities,and second,to improve their internal(2)for enterprises,first,to raise awareness of environmental protection and actively fulfill their environmental responsibilities,and second,to improve their internal management systems and enhance internal control;(3)for society,first,to widely publicize and make society aware of the significance of environmental information disclosure by enterprises for environmental protection,and second,to encourage the public to actively fulfill their responsibility to supervise the disclosure of environmental information by enterprises.