Professor Zhang Detao’s Research on the Potential Impact of Environmental Information Whitewashing Published in The Journal of World Economy.

Recently, the paper The Potential Impact of Corporate Environmental Information Whitewashing, written by Professor Zhang Detao from the School of Economics, Shandong University, doctoral student Zhang Jingjing (corresponding author), and master’s student Dong Shuai, was published in Issue 4, 2024 of The Journal of World Economy, a top domestic journal in economics.

Fully considering the cultural background of "one meaning with multiple words" in China, the paper establishes a Chinese characteristic environmental keyword lexicon based on 53 environmental policy documents issued in China in recent years and environmental keywords adopted in existing literature, so as to capture the environmental text information disclosed by enterprises. Based on the dual dimensions of environmental text information and substantive environmental information, the paper verifies whether Chinese listed enterprises have whitewashing behavior of "saying more" in text information but "saying less" in substantive information. On this basis, the paper discusses the potential impact of environmental information whitewashing from the perspective of return and risk, and examines the mechanism of the negative impact caused by whitewashing from the perspective of market participants, considering that enterprise information mainly affects enterprise development through the capital market. Further research finds that tone is a more concealed whitewashing method, and the decline of accounting information quality, the improvement of environmental information recognition ability and the increase of enterprise attention amplify the negative impact of whitewashing behavior. The above research results provide useful insights for improving the modern ecological civilization construction system and comprehensively promoting a Beautiful China.

This research was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the Major Basic Research Program of the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province, realizing the organic combination of environmental economics theory and corporate environmental governance practice.

Zhang Detao is a Professor and doctoral supervisor at the School of Economics, Shandong University, and a Qilu Young Scholar of Shandong University. Long focusing on major national strategic needs, he has carried out cutting-edge international research on green finance, digital finance, technology finance and other fields, and achieved a series of innovative theoretical and applied results at the international frontier level. In recent years, he has published more than 20 SSCI, SCI and CSSCI academic papers as the first or corresponding author in top or prestigious domestic and foreign journals, and presided over a number of National Natural Science Foundation projects.