We use a sample of China’s listed firms and employ a naïve Bayesian machine learning algorithm to reveal that environmental information intangibility superficially promotes green innovation. We demonstrate that this effect is channelled through the acquisition of institutional resources, including bank loans and government subsidies. The impact of environmental information intangibility on green innovation is most pronounced within state-owned enterprises, large firms, and politically connected firms. Furthermore, we confirm that environmental information intangibility does not lead to improvements in innovation efficiency or quality. This implies that green innovation may serve as a symbolic environmental activity. Our findings contribute to the understanding of the consequences of environmental information intangibility, greenwashing behaviour, and their relationship to green innovation.

This study investigates the relationship between directors’ foreign experience and corporate environmental disclosure in Chinese listed firms from 2009 to 2017. The research shows that directors with foreign experience have a positive and significant impact on corporate environmental disclosure. This effect is more pronounced in nonstate-owned enterprises, where directors have greater influence over managerial decisions. Additionally, the study suggests that in industries with high energy consumption, high pollution, or overcapacity, the positive effect can be further enhanced by having at least three directors with foreign experience or foreign experience members in the audit committee. The impact of experiential diversity on environmental disclosure is greater than that of board gender and independence diversity. The findings suggest that policymakers and firms prioritize the recruitment of directors with diverse experiences to improve their environmental disclosure practices.

In this paper, we use a distinct quasi-natural experiments to examine the effect of liberalization of the stock market on corporate environmental, social, and governance(ESG) disclosure quality. We find that the liberation of the opening of Shanghai(Shenzhen)-Hong Kong Stock Connect (SHSC) significantly and consistently improves ESG disclosure quality of listed companies, and this effect is most evident in environmental information disclosure. We then find that the SHSC can improve the quality of ESG disclosure of listed companies through “voting with feet” and “external supervision” effect. Furthermore, the effect is stronger in firms that are Non-SOEs and with low equity concentrations. Overall, our results suggest that the liberalization of stock market can improve the quality of companies’ ESG disclosure quality.

In this paper, we use a distinct quasi-natural experiments to examine the effect of liberalization of the stock market on corporate environmental, social, and governance(ESG) disclosure quality. We find that the liberation of the opening of Shanghai(Shenzhen)-Hong Kong Stock Connect (SHSC) significantly and consistently improves ESG disclosure quality of listed companies, and this effect is most evident in environmental information disclosure. We then find that the SHSC can improve the quality of ESG disclosure of listed companies through “voting with feet” and “external supervision” effect. Furthermore, the effect is stronger in firms that are Non-SOEs and with low equity concentrations. Overall, our results suggest that the liberalization of stock market can improve the quality of companies’ ESG disclosure quality.

Environmental information disclosure is an effective way for corporate to fulfill environmental protection responsibilities and encourage environmental self-inspection and management. In this paper, we utilize the environment fee to tax reform implemented in 2018 as a quasi-experiment, to investigate the impact of mandatory environmental regulation change on firm environmental information disclosure quality. Using data from listed companies in China between 2015-2020, we found that the mandatary environment regulation positively affects the monetary and non-monetary environmental information disclosure in heavy polluting industries. We also found that, firms with higher environmental subsidies and market value tend to disclose more information. The mechanism analysis shows that external governance and internal control mediate the effect of mandatory environmental regulation on environmental information disclosure quality. Compared to a growing literature on voluntary regulation, our findings provide evidence emphasizing the role of mandatory regulation of government incentives in environmental improvement.