Environmental Policy Uncertainty and Corporate Environmental Information Disclosure：Evidence from the Turnover of Local Environmental Protection Directors

Abstract

Theoretically, the turnover of local environmental protection directors may not only make the environmental policy stricter and promote corporate environmental information disclosure, but also cause the environmental policy to be broken and inhibit corporate environmental information disclosure. To this end, based on the research perspective of environmental policy uncertainty, this paper selects heavily polluting enterprises in China’s Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchange A-share from 2009 to 2017 as the research object, and examines the impact of the turnover in local environmental protection directors on corporate environmental information disclosure. The study finds that the turnover in local environmental protection directors has a significant positive impact on corporate environmental information disclosure, and the positive impact is not significantly different between state-owned enterprises and private enterprises, but the positive impact is declining over time. After cross-sectional analysis, it is found that the above-mentioned positive impact is mainly manifested in companies with low levels of marketization, close regulatory distance and poor environmental performance. In other words, when the marketization level is low, the positive impact is more significant, showing that the promotion can effectively compensate for the lack of the market mechanism; when the regulatory distance is long, the positive impact is significantly reduced, indicating that the promotion has a “distance attenuation effect”; when the environmental performance is poor, the positive impact is more significant, indicating that this promotion effect is stronger for companies of poor environmental performance. After examining the influence mechanism, it is found that the influence mechanism has heterogeneity of property rights, that is, the turnover of local environmental protection directors promotes the environmental information disclosure of private enterprises by increasing the intensity of environmental regulations and environmental subsidies, but promotes the environmental information disclosure of state-owned enterprises only by improving the intensity of environmental regulations. The conclusions expand the research on the driving factors of corporate environmental information disclosure from the perspective of the turnover of local environmental protection directors, and provide useful enlightenment for the relevant government departments to urge enterprises to assume the main responsibility of environmental governance.