Chinese shareholders’ reaction to the disclosure of environmental violations: a CSR perspective

Background

Since the past couple of decades, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been attracting increasing attention. However, research and practice on CSR usually focus on particular aspects of “social responsibility”, like for example, the minimum wage, job security and poverty alleviation. Recently, with increasing environmental concerns worldwide, the discussion on CSR to incorporate activities that regenerate the quality of our natural environment has rapidly increased.

In 1970, Nobel Prize winner Friedman wrote a public article emphasizing the role of CSR in corporate management.¹ He pointed out that company managers must take social responsibility into account when seeking high economic profits. They should reserve social welfare through the promise of a no-pollution-and-no-discrimination scheme.

From the 1970s to 1990s, many Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) solicited companies to combine environmental responsibility with their normal business operation. The 1987 report “Our Common Future” issued by the World Commission on Environment and Development called for governments, companies and the public to attach importance to social and environmental responsibility. In the 1999 annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, the then secretary general of the United Nations proposed the Global Compact, which appealed to companies to obey ten basic principles on human rights, labor standards, environmental protection and anti-corruption. Particularly, in the environmental protection area, the Compact asked companies to take precautions actively.

The International Finance Corporation (IFC), in its 2002 report, stated that developing countries should pay more attention to social progress and environmental protection to reap holistic benefits. In 2008, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) launched the initiative of Green Economy, which encourages companies to regard environmental protection as an engine for development, instead of a burden. It is now become important to realize that environmental protection for a company is no longer a necessity, but a responsibility (Küskü 2007).

Among the recent literature published in this field, CSR and Corporate Environmental Responsibility (CER) take an even critical role. As shown in Fig. 1, we observe an increasing interest in the Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database respectively.

If you consider the case of China, the GDP growth rate has been exceeding 7% for more than 10 years, creating an economic miracle. But the exclusive development pattern has given rise to incessant pollution² problems leading to a number of environmental violations with severe consequences. Although the society in general attaches much more attention on environmental protection, publicly listed companies in China still frequently engage in activities that are harmful to the environment, which not only causes economic damage but also leads to environmental damage.

As a result, environmental protection has gained substantial prominence in governmental documents. The Chinese government committed to put “heavy efforts” for controlling pollution in the 18th Chinese communist party congress, and announced plans to accelerate the construction of the environmental legal system. In 2014, the government put forward the concept of a “New Normal”, taking into consideration factors such as environmental protection while stimulating economic development. For public companies specifically, a series of mandates have been introduced such as the Instruction on the Supervision of Public Companies’ Environmental Protection, Announcement on the Environmental Scrutiny of Public Companies, Guideline for Public Companies’ Environmental Information Disclosure. In 2008, the China Securities Regulatory Commission issued the Notice on the Environmental Scrutiny of IPOs for Heavy Pollution Industries, setting higher environmental criteria from the very beginning for heavily polluting companies’ going public. Through these measures, the government has managed to encourage companies to pay attention to CER and restrict hazardous emissions.

Motivation

Intuitively, it seems that environmental violation causes economic as well as reputational loss, which should result in a drop in the stock price. However, the Chinese stock market reveals some conflicting statistics. On one hand, VEYONG (600,803.SH) encountered a drop of 8.34% in a single day, because of its failure to pass environmental scrutiny; GSRH (600,311.SH) had 2 days’ stock price decrement after the environmental violation; Resulting from pollution occurring in a subsidiary, the stock price of HPGC (600,795.SH) decreased by 7.39%, leading to the whole electricity industry decreasing by 4%. On the other hand, GUANGJI PHARM (000952.SZ) enjoyed almost a 10% rise after a pollution accident. And Zijin Mining (601,899.SH), with an environmental violation, reached the 10% raising limit for the first trading day, and achieved almost a 50% increment in total for the first ten trading days. The above cases were sourced from the CNKI data base, the Wind database and the website of the Ministry of Environmental Protection of China.

The impacts of environmental violations in China differ a lot under different situations. This paper aims to discover the general driving force behind CSR perceptions of Chinese managers and stockholders. The two main objectives of this paper are to assist public company managers understand the outcomes of environmental violations and how such violations influence shareholders’ decisions and, to enable shareholders make better investment decisions.

Structure and contribution

The empirical analysis relies on the method of “Event Study” which is applied to calculate the cumulative abnormal return (CAR) from environmental violations, and then a regression model is used for to explain it.

The first chapter briefly introduces the background, objective and contribution, making clear the structure of the research. And the second chapter elaborates the major theories of corporate social responsibility, corporate environmental management and corporate market value management, as well as making some research advancements. The third part is concerning the research design, based on the environmental violations of Chinese public companies from 2002 to 2014. This paper calculates their cumulative abnormal return and proposes the related explanatory variables. Major variables include, from the external perspective, time trend and media attention; and from the internal perspective, previous pollution situations and CSR performance. It concludes that, the environmental violations from Chinese public companies will result in a negative reaction from the shareholders, and the external influence is stronger than the internal influence. The negative reaction weakens as time goes by, and strengthens with the higher attention from the media. Those companies which have published a CSR report in the previous year performed better when facing the accident, while previous pollution control does not show a significant impact. The fifth chapter discusses three problems that arise during the research, and promotes four policy suggestions. The sixth chapter provides a general conclusion.

The main contributions of the paper are: 1) It supplements the research on corporate environmental responsibility; 2) In the other papers written on this subject, researchers have paid more attention to the outcome of environmental violations calling for the necessity of environmental management, but not enough attention has been paid to the factors that lead to the violations; and 3) this is an attempt to analyse the Chinese perspective by focusing on the impact of pollution on the market value of Chinese public companies.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR)

In the early seventeenth century, Adam Smith discussed the idea of CSR for the first time in his book The Wealth of Nations. He pointed out that the social responsibility of a company is to offer goods and service to the society while pursuing maximum profit during the operation. In other words, the social responsibility of a company is a co-product when it is seeking to maximize profit.

In 1953, Howard Bowen introduced the theory of CSR in his research Social Responsibilities of the Businessman, in which CSR is regarded as a component of corporate management (Bowen 1953). Later, Wallich and McGowan argued that from the perspective of a narrow sense of optimizing stockholders’ earnings, it is not a good choice to take much social responsibility. Thus, early research in this field emphasized that the priority of a company is to create value for the shareholders and giving attention to CSR may impede the free growth of the company.

Recent research works however identify CSR as an important element in the operation of a company. In 1999, Richardson examined how CSR influences the stock market, drawing the conclusion that better CSR performance can stimulate market value in an upward trend. Brancoet investigated the implications of CSR from a resource-based-view, acknowledging that CSR is an important resource of a company that is expected to bring good reputation and higher employee morale (Branco and Rodrigues, 2006). Barnett applied the stakeholder theory and related influence model to explain the different impacts of CSR in various types of companies. Jamali also discussed the mutual influence and mutual promotion of CSR and operational performance (Jamali 2008). It can be said that CSR is looked upon as something that will promote positive performance of the company’s operational performance, through bringing better reputation, morale and consumer loyalty.

Even though abundant research has been conducted on CSR, there is still no generally accepted definition of it. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development stresses that “CSR is the continuing commitment by businesses to behave ethically and contribute to economic development while improving the quality of life of the workforce and their families, as well as of the local community and society at large.” The European Union defines CSR as “… the concept that an enterprise is accountable for its impact on all relevant stakeholders. It is the continuing commitment by businesses to behave fairly and responsibly and contribute to economic development while improving the quality of life of the work force and their families as well as of the local community and society at large…”.

Thus, according to the generic definitions stated above, CSR aims to integrate corporate activity with the concept of social welfare to improve stakeholders’ benefits and to promote the sustainable development of society.

Corporate environmental management

Since the 1960s, the pollution problem has worsened, which led to increasing attention on environmental protection. With the active intervention of the governments and the environmental awareness of the public, more and more companies are bringing environmental management into their daily operation decisions, and are pursuing consistency in their environmental and operational goals.

The Brundtland Report which was published in 1987 as a result of World Commission on Environment highlighted the significance of CSR. Economist and business scholars have been grappling with the question of how and why corporations should incorporate environmental concerns into their own strategies.

Walley and Whitehead point out that companies should actively take into account environmental management when making a business decision. Klassen and McLaughlin think that environmental management encompasses all efforts to minimize the negative environmental impact of the firm’s products throughout their life cycle (Klassen and McLaughlin 1996). Environmental performance measures how successful a firm is in reducing and minimizing its impact on the environment. Timmins lists three goals of environmental management: 1) To minimize the operational impact on the environment; 2) To take every possible effort to efficiently use the available resources; and 3) Build up an environmental management system and stimulate the employees to consider the environment during their work. Shrivastava and Hart (1995) emphasize the concept of “total environmental management” and “sustainable organizational design”, meaning at each step of the value chain or lifecycle of products and services, every organizational activity from raw material usage (inputs), through production processes (throughputs), to the disposal of packages and used products (outputs) is associated with environmental problems (Shrivastava and Hart 1995). More and more companies regard environmental management as their responsibility (Hart 2000), and make special efforts to improve the environmental standards.

Thus, as a result of a lot of governments coming to put a strong emphasis on the stringent implementation of pro-environment regulations and also because of voluntary initiatives, many companies have now made environmental regeneration and protection their prime objective. The International Financial Corporation, in its report “Developing Value” noted that “businesses in emerging Markets have been involved in areas such as social development or environmental improvements, and have achieved cost savings, revenue growth and other business benefits”.

Porter noted that “in many cases properly designed legal environmental standards could still trigger innovations that lower the total cost of a product or improve its value. Such innovations allow companies to use a range of inputs more productively, from raw materials to energy to labor, thus offsetting the cost of diminishing environmental impact and ending the stalemate” (Porter 2000). Chinese scholar Chen’s summary of environmental management aptly encompasses this idea. He says “In the whole value chain, take the environmental issue in mind from the very beginning to the very end; through cooperation with different departments, to minimize the negative impact of environmental problems and finally realize the mutual promotion of environmental performance and financial performance”.

Among all of the discussions on environmental management, the “environment-as-a-recourse” view is the most commonly accepted. Porter argues that the environmental management of corporates will provide new and competitive resources (Porter 1991). Lovis, et all. Also supplement this understanding of the resource - based management. Through an analysis of corporate environmental management, their research suggests that enterprises should take a road of “extending return”, through technical innovation to realize the economic benefits and environmental benefits simultaneously.

Market value management

The theory of market value management was first raised in China, which is a theory focusing on the market value or specifically the stock value of public companies. Some scholars point out that this theory is rooted in the western classical value management theory.

In 1994, McTaggart published the paper The Value Imperative, and put forward the definition of value management or value-based management (VBM). In 1980, Porter published the book Competitive Strategy in which he produced an analysis based on value management and value chain. In the 1980s, Kaplan established the value evaluation process in his book Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies. In the early 1990s, the American consulting company Stern and Steward raised the value management modes of Economic Value Added (EVA) and Market Value Added (MVA).

China initiated stock reforms in 2005 and basically realized the circulation of state owned shares in 2008. After the reform, the management methods under the planned economy could no longer meet the requirements of the capital market practice. So the idea of market value management emerged in response to the needs of the time.

Lots of scholars have tries to define market value management. For example, writes that market value management is to use market indexes as a tool, use the scientific and rational methods of value creation and value operation, and apply the ideas of management science, financial management, economics and so on, to maximize the value to shareholders. Points out in his study that, market value management is to take sustained, stable and effective operation and management to enhance the market value of a public company, and to make the market value reflect the company inherent value. Defines market value management as having the external goal of maximizing shareholders’ value, while also having the internal goal of maximizing stakeholders’ value.

Foreign academic advancement

Specifically on the topic of shareholders’ reaction to the environmental violations, some studies already exist. Some scholars point out that controlling pollution and strengthening environmental management will result in additional costs for the company and thereby reduce profit. Some others argue that focusing more on the environmental management will bring better reputation for the company, thus enhancing sales and profit. Most of the researchers, including Jaggi and Freedman (1992) find that shareholders react negatively to environmental violations. Klassen and McLaughlin (1996) provide the idea that the stock price will increase after the environmental improvement events and decrease after the environmental violation. Klassen and McLaughlin (1996) draws out the relationship between environmental performance and financial performance (Fig. 2).

There are two methods used to research the above topic: event studies and the structure environmental information index.

Domestic academic advancement

Domestically, the same two methods mentioned above are used.

Data collection

On the 8^th January 2002, the Chinese State Council had an important conference with the theme of the conference being the country environmental protection. In the conference, the tenth environmental 5 year plan was established, signaling a new stage of environmental protection in the whole country and also raises new requirements for the company environmental management. Some researchers note that the year of 2002 should be regarded as the start of a new era for corporate environmental management in China. Considering this background, the authors take the sample period of 2002 to 2014 by using data from Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges.

To address the environmental violations which reveal the situation of firms’ environmental violations, the authors look to the Wind database, CNKI (Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure) database and the website of the Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection with the key words pollution, explosion, oil spilling and waste water.

Methodology: Event study

Usually, the event date is defined as t = 0. And then the issue is to choose the event window. The same event may be disclosed by more than one media at a different time, which causes the problem of “Event Uncertainty”. There are two major methods to solve this problem. Firstly, expand the event window to several days before or after.. For example, Klassen & McLaughlin, Dasgupta, Laplante & Mamingi and Flammer make use of the (−1, 1) window. Xu, Zeng & Tam use the (−10, 10) window, Yan uses (−5, 10) while Lu uses (−10, 20). Secondly, the authors conduct a robustness test with different event windows.

In this paper, the authors attempt to use three different methods. Firstly, the authors apply the most popular event window of (−1, 1); secondly, a robustness test is performed; and thirdly, the day the event happened is searched in the news for a comparison.

It is the most commonly used method, and this paper also applies this method.

Hypothesis and variables

As mentioned earlier, this paper refers to Flammer’s method of a two dimensional research framework of “environment-as-a-resource”. According to the framework, the environment acts as a new and competitive resource for the corporation. And there is both the external and internal pressure for the corporation to execute environmental management. External impacts include publishing of new regulations, media attention, and consumer environmental awareness; the internal impacts include previous CSR performance. Environmental violations will cause stock abnormal return.

Data from developed countries exhibit quite a significant impact of environmental violations on the stock market. For example, the result from the America petrochemical companies shows an average drop of 1.3% in 2 days’ event window Japan’s public companies (including petrochemical, automobile, food and other industries) appear to have significant share price reductions after environmental violations, for the European market (Ziegler, etc., 2007) and the Indian market, the results are significant.

Considering the external impacts, with the ever strengthening focus on environmental education and the related regulations, the environmental awareness of shareholders becomes stronger, making the environment as a resource gain better value. Klassen and McLaughlin (1996) pay attention to the time trend. Additionally, when reading previous researches, the authors find that the significance ratio of the negative effect increases.

The P/E ratio, is an equity valuation multiple. It is defined as market price per share divided by annual earnings per share. This indicator is used to measure the growth ability of the companies. The better the growth ability is, the more the companies would like to focus on sustainable development.

Based on the above hypotheses, this paper uses the following variables:

Significance of CAR

Figure 3 shows the summary of CAR from (−10, 10). It is clear that the stock price drops in the (−1,1) event window, and increases dramatically from the second day.

The Fig. 4 indicates the CAR of 154 events in the event window of (−1,1). As we can see, the mean is less than zero, and the points are distributed regularly on both sides of the mean line. At the same time, there are two extreme values, point A Zijin Mining (601,899.SH) which is higher than 20%, and point B GSRH (600,311.SH) which is lower than 20%. When doing the regression, in order to avoid deviation, the authors will firstly exclude the two extreme values and then perform the robustness test. In addition to that, BBMG (601,992.SH) is also excluded because of data missing in the Wind database.

Regression model for CAR

Before running the regression of CAR, the author conducts two tests for the validity of the data: a test for multicollinearity and a test for heteroskedasticity.

Improve the government environmental scrutiny management to help the market punish environmental violators

The government as a vehicle of environmental scrutiny can have a tremendous impact in raising CSR activities. Dasgupta et al. (1997) finds that the environmental supervision department is not the only unit to punish pollution, as the capital market also reactions to the event. In this sense, lack of sufficient strong supervision is not the key issue that results in a bad environmental situation. If the capital market receives enough information or the shareholders have better environmental awareness, the pollution event will attract harsher punishment. Considering the result of this paper, Chinese shareholders’ negative reaction to the environmental violation is weaker than that of America and Canada. Information transfer may be one of the reasons for this.

Nowadays, developed countries rely more on market mechanisms to promote environmental protection. For example, institutional investors (pension fund, insurance company) use the shareholders’ voting right to enhance the environmental management. The environmental supervision of developed countries is more complete, and the institutional investors are more mature, hence they tend to invest in companies with better environmental performance. On the other hand, developing countries rely more on government supervision and financial regulation, in order to guide the companies to be more environmentally responsible. It is not easy to compare these two modes, especially in the long term. Concurrently, the two modes show a trend of merging. For example, in the developed countries, more and more people realize that it is difficult to have a sustainable market by relying only on the market mechanism and the government should be a very important actor. At the same time, there are some concerns on developing countries’ administrative intervention. Researchers acknowledge some drawbacks associated with compulsory environmental governance dominance. And that the government should pay more attention to guiding the market willingness and creating a better market atmosphere so as to promote better cooperation with the market.

Strengthen environmental accounting and environmental auditing for public companies

Nowadays, the environmental information disclosure mechanism of Chinese public companies is not very smooth and efficient. The content is simple and without a uniform format; and has more qualitative disclosure than quantitative disclosure; more good news than bad news. In 2014, only 633 companies among 2516 listed in the Chinese main board published a CSR report. And only 14 companies published an environmental responsibility report, a mere 0.55% of Chinese listed companies.

The Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection enacted a document on Environmental Information Disclosure on May 1^st, 2008. This document requires companies to disclose their environmental information in a timely and accurate manner. The m = Ministry introduced the Guidance for Environmental Information Disclosure in 2010, asking the public polluting companies to provide certain environmental information. On April 10^th 2014, the Ministry announced that it would conduct a survey on environmental responsibility countrywide to urge companies to set up an environmental responsibility reporting mechanism. On March 6^th, 2015, the Ministry issued a notice about the pilot projects on environmental auditing, promoting environmental auditing to a higher level for which Gansu province was chosen as the first pilot.

Public companies are encouraged to introduce environmental accounting and environmental auditing and to put more environmental information into their balance sheet and income sheet. Giving out better environmental accounting information is a positive signal of environmental responsibility. And this is a good way for the companies to move away from profit-oriented development to overall sustainable development.

It is of great necessity to build up an environmental information platform with the regulators, publicly listed companies, the media and the general public thereby encouraging the companies to disclose more environmental information and care more about their environmental image. Referring to the index system developed by the Chinese Academy of Environmental planning, this area would benefit from a scientific system developed from environmental law, environmental management and environmental performance. At the same time, such a system would require active support from the government, through expert judgment and independent verification from third-parties to confirm the validity of the data. Chinese Rankins CSR Ratings Company (RKS) is attempting to build up such a platform, although it is still in a very early stage.

Also, some foreign social responsibility indexes can be taken into consideration to promote the environmental management and development. For example MSCI KLD 400 (KLD’s Domini 400 Social Index) and (Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes, DJSI). The MSCI KLD 400 Social Index was launched in 1990 and is designed to help socially conscious investors weigh social and environmental factors in their investment choices. And The Dow Jones Sustainability Indices (DJSI) are a family of indices evaluating the sustainability performance of the largest 2500 companies listed on the Dow Jones Global Total Stock Market Index. They are the longest-running global sustainability benchmarks worldwide and have become the key reference point in sustainability investing for investors and companies alike.

Cultivate public environmental awareness, especially for the corporation managers.

The government should take the responsibility to educate the public and use different methods for different segments of citizens to improve the environmental awareness of the whole society. This needs to be done for two main reasons: Firstly, to stimulate corporate managers to be actively involved in environmental management; Secondly, to help ordinary workers generate better environmental ideas thereby introducing consumers to the green consumption concept.

The government should encourage companies to enact the ISO 14000 environmental management and to include environmental management ideas in the whole process of the company management. Companies should be recommended to have an environmental management team. At the same time, companies should ensure collaboration between environmental management, financial management and social management, creating an overall organism that shares sources. Applying the requirements of total environmental management (Fig. 5), companies should have a complete plan for the production procedure to achieve the desired environmental improvements.

Shrivastava and Hart (1995) put forward the concept of total environmental management (Fig. 5), suggesting that companies should pay more attention to environmental protection throughout the whole value chain.