Given the widespread impacts of firm activities on the environment, firms are increasingly required to disclose environmental information. However, the relation between environmental information disclosure and firm financial performance is controversial and the mechanism through which environmental information disclosure affects financial performance is insufficiently investigated. This research examined the effect of environmental information disclosure on financial performance and explored the mediating effects of visibility (e.g., analyst coverage and institutional ownership) and liquidity. Panel data from 289 Chinese listed firms were analyzed with the assistance of STATA Software. The results revealed that environmental information disclosure positively (directly) affects financial performance. Further, environmental information disclosure also indirectly affects financial performance via analyst coverage (e.g., number of analysts and number of reports) and liquidity. Analyst coverage and liquidity mediate the relationship between environmental information disclosure and financial performance while institutional ownership has no mediating effect. According to the results, practical implications were discussed and future research directions were noted.

Introduction

With the deterioration of the environment and increasingly serious environmental problems, stakeholders pay more and more attention to the environmental responsibilities of firms (Lu et al., 2018; Pu et al., 2019). To cope with climate change, the international community and governments have taken a series of measures, for example, establishing regulations (Han et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2019a; Zhang et al., 2019b) and carbon emission trading systems (Dong et al., 2019; Yao et al., 2019b). In response to the stock market’s focus on sustainable development, rating agencies (i.e., Morgan Stanley Capital International and Thomson Reuters) and financial information providers (i.e., Bloomberg) provided data on environmental society and governance (Yu et al., 2018). These measures effectively regulate the pollution behavior of enterprises and the overall number of environmental accidents has exhibited a significant downward trend from 2006 to 2015 (Cao et al., 2018). Government efforts and environmental regulation directly and indirectly influence haze pollution governance (Wang et al., 2016; Wang et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2019b). In addition, the level of carbon dioxide emissions also has declined significantly in recent years (Chen et al., 2019c; Ru et al., 2019; Yang et al., 2019). As an important source of pollution, enterprises need to increase the intensity of environmental information disclosure to deal with pressure (Gao et al., 2017; Lin et al., 2017; Shi et al., 2017). Environmental information disclosure is generally defined as a method of describing firms’ environmental-related activities and information to users of financial statements (Trumpp et al., 2015). According to the report of the Institute of Governance and Responsibility, the proportion of companies in the S&P 500 index that adopt sustainability reporting increased from 53% in 2012 to 82% in 2017 (Yu et al., 2018).