دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی تاثیر شرایط یارانه های کشور چین بر افشاگری داوطلبانه مسئولیت اجتماعی شرکت - الزویر 2017

abstract

This paper examines whether state subsidy is a determinant of the voluntary corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosures of Chinese listed firms. Using archival data from a sample of manufacturing firms listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 2008 to 2012, we find that state subsidies have a material influence on CSR disclosure choice beyond the variables that commonly figure in Western models. This effect is concentrated among the non-state-owned enterprises (NSOEs) rather than the state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and especially when subsidies are granted through non-tax based rather than tax-based channels. Further analysis also suggests that these findings are more pronounced among firms domiciled in regions with a higher level of corruption. Our findings shed light on how political cost considerations influence firms’ decisions to disclose CSR information in China where government intervention in the economic and business environment is pervasive.

Conclusion

The objective of our study is to examine the effect of state subsidies on CSR disclosures in China.22 Using a sample of Chinese manufacturing firms over the period of 2008–2012, we obtain two original findings. First, a significantly positive association between voluntary CSR disclosure and state subsidies is more pronounced among the NSOEs than SOEs. Second, the positive effect of state subsidies on voluntary CSR disclosure among NSOEs is attributed mainly to the non-tax related subsidies. We argue that these findings are consistent with the political cost hypothesis (Watts and Zimmerman, 1978) applied to the context of Chinese political economy. Our findings are robust to controls for the other determinants of CSR disclosure identified by previous studies based on Western developed markets. Our focus on the effect of state subsidies also distinguishes this paper from previous studies of the determinants of CSR disclosure in China.23 Our findings have implications for both the academic literature and policy makers. Beyer et al. (2010) suggest that the corporate information environment comprises of three components, i.e. firms’ voluntary disclosure, mandatory disclosures required by regulators, and analyst research, with voluntary disclosure being most important since managers have superior information about the firm. Based on the seminal work of Watts and Zimmerman (1978, 1986), academic studies have sought to establish evidence for the political cost considerations as an explanation of voluntary corporate disclosure choices (Fields et al., 2001; Healy and Palepu, 2001) including CSR reporting (Gray et al., 2013; Huang and Watson, 2015). However, these studies largely rely on firm size as a proxy for political cost, without properly explaining the validity of this approach (Ball and Foster, 1982; Watts and Zimmerman, 1978). Unlike previous studies, we exploit the institutional features of Chinese style capitalism to apply state subsidies as a proxy for political cost considerations. Since state subsidies are important ways that the government uses to influence corporate policies in China (Allen et al., 2005; Lee et al., 2014), they provide a more direct link between political cost considerations and the managerial incentives and choices underlying corporate disclosure decisions. Our evidence also reveals that this link can be influenced by the level of firms’ political connectedness. We show that firms with stronger government support, such as SOEs in our context, are less sensitive to political cost considerations than their NSOE counterparts. In other words, connectedness can potentially moderate the sensitivity of corporate disclosure to political cost considerations.