Can anti-corruption improve the quality of environmental information disclosure?

Wenjian He,Ye Wei

doi:10.1007/s11356-021-15932-w

Abstract

This study takes the anti-corruption campaign of the 18th CPC National Congress in China as an exogenous impact build a double difference (DID) model, proving that anti-corruption can increase the quality of enterprise environmental information disclosure significantly. After a series of tests such as parallel trend test and placebo test, the results are still robust. The intermediary effect model results indicate that the anti-corruption increases the violation cost of enterprises and encourages enterprises to carry out innovation activities, and ultimately increase the quality of enterprise environmental information disclosure. Heterogeneity analysis finds that non-state-owned enterprises, large enterprises, and regions with more substantial environmental supervision will improve the quality of enterprise environmental information disclosure to a greater extent. The findings of this paper can help provide policy inspiration for improving the mandatory environmental information disclosure system and strengthening the enforcement of environmental regulations.

Highlights

As the booming of China's economy, serious environmental pollution has proved to be a key factor restricting society's overall development (Du et al, 2013; Wang and Sun, 2018; Zhang et al, 2018)
It can be found that the coefficient of AntiCorrijt is significantly positive in the level p < 0.05, and the anti-corruption campaign leads to an average increase of 0.49 points in the environmental information disclosure index, accounting for 5.3% of its average level
Based on the quasi-natural experiment of the anti-corruption campaign, this research uses the data of environmental information disclosure index of heavy polluting enterprises in Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share manufacturing industry over 2008–2018 to construct a double difference model (DID) to estimate the net effect of the anti-corruption campaign on the quality of enterprise environmental disclosure

Summary

Introduction

As the booming of China's economy, serious environmental pollution has proved to be a key factor restricting society's overall development (Du et al, 2013; Wang and Sun, 2018; Zhang et al, 2018). As an essential channel for external stakeholders to obtain corporate environmental performance, environmental information disclosure is an integral part of China's modern environmental regulatory system. Up to now,China has issued several regulations to standardize environmental information disclosure (Wang and Zhang, 2019), such as the Environmental information disclosure (trial), the Measures for Environmental Information Disclosure of Enterprises and Institutions, etc. These regulations stipulate heavy polluting enterprises to disclose environmental information about pollutant emissions, the operation of environmental protection facilities, environmental input, etc.

Results

Discussion

Conclusion