The divergence and driving factors of corporate environmental information disclosure in China

Abstract

Corporate environmental information disclosure (EID) has been a widely acknowledged issue in the field of ecological environment research. This paper explores the spatiotemporal evolution characteristics of EID in China from 2008 to 2022, and discusses the industry and regional heterogeneity. It reveals significant differences in EID between heavy and non-heavy polluting industries, as well as among different economic regions, revealing that there is still significant potential for improvement in corporate environmental governance. Further, this paper establishes a two-way fixed effects model and empirically investigates the effects of internal and external driving factors on EID. In addition, Lasso regression model is used to screen the vital driving factors and analyze their relative importance. The empirical results show that enterprise size, management age, operating capacity, supervisory board size, and debt capacity have relatively more substantial explanations for changes in EID, which are more critical driving factors. The contribution of the study is to provide valuable reference for constructing corporate EID indicator system, and to points out the direction for the sustainable development of enterprises in different industries and regions. At the same time, it has theoretical guiding significance for finding the factors that promote EID and strengthening regional environmental governance.