Evaluation and analysis of influencing factors on the quality of carbon disclosure:An empirical study of CDP in China

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the quality of corporate carbon disclosure and to analyze its influencing factors. With the hand-collected carbon information from annual reports, social responsibility reports, sustainability reports and opened CDP questionnaires of the sample of 100 Chinese companies investigated by CDP from 2008-2011, the quality of carbon disclosure is defined by evaluating indicators obtained from factor analysis, and its influencing factors are studied from three aspects including company characteristics, financial features and corporate governance by means of correlation, differences comparison and regression analyses. Findings show that the quality of Chinese companies’ carbon disclosure is mainly affected by company characteristics(such as the emission characteristics of one’s industry and dual listed) and corporate governance(such as ownership concentration), but in perspective of financial features, there seems to be little relation between the disclosure quality and financing motivations. The practical implication of the paper is to help Chinese companies find out effective ways to improve carbon disclosure quality. The paper contributes to carbon disclosure literature by explaining the connotation of carbon information, providing a set of evaluation indicators of carbon disclosure and exploring the influencing factors from various perspectives.