Evaluation of Environmental Information Disclosure of Listed Companies in China’s Heavy Pollution Industries: A Text Mining-Based Methodology

Rongjiang Cai, Tao Lv and Xu Deng
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Rongjiang Cai: School of Management, China University of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou 221116, China
Xu Deng: School of Management, China University of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou 221116, China

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 10, 1-23

Abstract: Environmental information disclosure (EID) of listed companies is a significant and essential reference for assessing their environmental protection commitment. However, the content and form of EID are complex, and previous assessment studies involved manual scoring mainly by the experts in this field. It is subjective and has low timeliness. Therefore, this paper proposes an automatic evaluation framework of EID quality based on text mining (TM), including the EID index system’s construction, automatic scoring of environmental information disclosure quality, and EID index calculation. Furthermore, based on the EID of 801 listed companies in China’s heavy pollution industry from 2013 to 2017, case studies are conducted. The case study results show that the overall quality of the EID of listed companies in China’s heavily polluting industries is low, and there is a gap differentiation between the 16 industries. Compared with the subjective manual scoring method, TM evaluation can evaluate the quality of EID more effectively and accurately. It has great potential and can become an essential tool for the sustainable development of society and listed companies.

Keywords: text mining; data science; quality of environmental information disclosure; listed companies; sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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