The External Pressure, Internal Drive and Voluntary Carbon Disclosure in China

ABSTRACT

The increasingly serious environmental problems, such as rising sea levels and heavy smog, have made environmental consciousness in society more urgent. The key issue is how to motivate firms to disclose environmental information. In this paper, we use data on 200 listed enterprises in China as a sample and research the factors that affect voluntary carbon disclosure. We found that local government regulatory pressure and social pressure have different levels of influence on carbon information disclosure of state-owned enterprises and non-state-owned enterprises; local government regulatory pressure have a greater impact on state-owned enterprises’ carbon information disclosure, while social pressures have a greater impact on non-state-owned enterprises. Finally, we make some suggestions aimed at promoting disclosure of carbon information.

KEY WORDS:

• disclosure motivation
• external pressure
• internal drivers
• voluntary carbon disclosure

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers who provided helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. We thank also editor-in-chief Ali Kutan and Debra for their great work and on useful suggestions on this paper.

Notes

1. A-shares are common stock denominated in RMB. It is a stock issued by a company in China for domestic institutions, organizations, or individuals (excluding Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao investors) to subscribe and trade in RMB.

2. Stock market in Shanghai Stock Exchange and Shenzhen Stock Exchange.

3. Special treatment refers to the management of stock trading of listed companies with abnormal financial status or other conditions.

4. An official website for information disclosure on listed companies in China.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by China National Social Science Fund Projects under Grant [number 15BGL054]; Finance and Economic Development Special Project of Jiangsu Provincial Social Science Applied Research under Grant [number 19CB-34]; Guizhou University of Finance and Economics Initiated Research Fund for Talents Introduction under Grant [number 2018YJ11] and Fundamental Research Funds for the Chinese Central Universities under Grant [number 2019B19714].