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

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.

Can Environmental Information Disclosure Enhance Firm Value?—An Analysis Based on Textual Characteristics of Annual Reports

“…Most current research uses the text mining analysis method when evaluating the level of environmental information companies disclose. Our previous study utilized text mining and machine learning to develop a system of independent environmental information disclosure indexes, calculate an environmental information disclosure index, and calculate the quality level measurement of environmental information disclosure as an indicator of enterprise environmental disclosure practices [62,63]. A kernel density chart of the environmental information disclosure quality of enterprises in China's heavy pollution industry is shown in Figure 2.…”

Developing climate neutrality among supply chain members in metal and mining industry: natural resource-based view perspective

“…Many scholars have also adopted the case study method to investigate various aspects of this area of research (Dewulf et al, 2021;Farmaki et al, 2021;Leal Filho et al, 2021;Mencho, 2022). Further, the unit of analysis in the majority of these case studies has either been a country (Cai et al, 2021;Denoncourt, 2022;Fraser et al, 2022;Kuzior and Grebski, 2022;Matikainen, 2022), a geographical region (Farmaki et al, 2021;Que et al, 2019;Yuan et al, 2022) or a Climate neutrality among supply chain members specific mineral (Dewulf et al, 2021;Kadel et al, 2022). Studies analyzing multiple cases have compared processing plants within the same company (Kadel et al, 2022), multiple projects across organizations (Kshetri, 2022), or multiple companies within the same region (Ng et al, 2022;Serfontein-Jordaan and Dlungwane, 2022).…”

“…, 2021; Mencho, 2022). Further, the unit of analysis in the majority of these case studies has either been a country (Cai et al. , 2021; Denoncourt, 2022; Fraser et al.…”