Stakeholders' power, corporate characteristics, and social and environmental disclosure: evidence from China

This paper investigates the influences of stakeholders' power and corporate characteristics on social and environmental disclosure practices of socially responsible Chinese listed firms identified by a social responsibility ranking list. A stakeholder-driven, three-dimensional social and environmental disclosure index including disclosure quantity, disclosure type quality and disclosure item quality, is constructed to assess sample firms' social and environmental disclosures in their two public reports: annual reports and corporate social responsibility reports. Findings indicate that corporate social and environmental disclosures have significant and positive associations with firm size, profitability, and industry classification. The roles of various powerful stakeholders in influencing corporate social and environmental disclosures are found to be generally weak in China, except that shareholders have influenced corporate social and environmental disclosures and creditors have influenced corporate disclosures related to firms' environmental performance. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.