A Tale of Two Segmented Markets in China: The Informative Value of Corporate Environmental Information Disclosure for Foreign Investors

Abstract

Focusing on the unique setting of two segmented stock markets in China and using a sample of Chinese listed firms issuing both A-shares and B-shares during the period of 2007–2014, this study examines the influence of corporate environmental information disclosure on foreign share discount, and further investigates the moderating effect of globalizing the board. The findings show that environmental information disclosure is significantly negatively related to foreign share discount, suggesting that environmental information disclosure provides valuable and incremental information to mitigate information asymmetry between domestic and foreign investors, and thus reduces foreign share discount. Moreover, globalizing the board reinforces the negative relation between environmental information disclosure and foreign share discount. These findings are robust to alternative measures of environmental information disclosure and foreign share discount, and further, these conclusions are still valid after controlling for the endogeneity problem.