Abstract:
This paper empirically studied the relationship between executives' political promotion expectation and environmental information disclosure quality focusing on central SOEs in heavily-polluting industries, with hand-collected data of executives' personal characteristics. It was found that central SOEs' chairmen's political promotion expectation was significantly negatively correlated with the quality of environmental information disclosure in heavily-polluting industries, supporting the "negative effect" hypothesis of political promotion expectation, but presidents' political promotion expectation had no significant impact on that, which indicates that the "first-in-command" phenomenon is prominent in central SOEs. Moreover, under the influence of local governments' environmental supervision, the negative relationship between chairmen's political promotion expectation and environmental information disclosure quality is stronger, showing that chairmen have a tendency to "evade risks" when facing political promotion opportunities; while the listed age can inhibit the negative relationship, indicating that the "soft constraint" of reputation plays a positive role.