Institutional Investors, Managers’ Power and Environmental Performance Information Disclosure: Evidence from Listed Firms of Heavy Polluting Industries in Shanghai Stock Exchange of China

Abstract

The level of the firms’ environmental performance information is related to managers’ private benefit behaviour influenced by power strengths . Meanwhile, institutional investors are able to balance managers’ power and impact managers’ behaviour decisions. In the context of existing selective disclosure environmental performance information happening to managers, whether are institutional investors able to contribute to weaken or restrain this kind of behaviours and further improve the quality of our listed firms’ environmental performance information disclosure? On the basis of the stakeholder theory and manager power theory, this paper chooses heavy-polluted listed firms on Shanghai Stock Exchange between 2008 and 2011 as the objects of research and empirically tests the influence of institutional investors and managers’ power on environmental performance information disclosure. The results show that higher managers’ power will negatively affect environmental performance information disclosure, but stable institutional investors are able to control managers’ power positively and effectively guide them to disclose environmental performance information. While, unstable institutional investors won’t do as previous. Furthermore, the environmental performance information disclosure quality of state-owned listed firms is significantly higher than non-state-owned ones.