The Relationship between Disclosure of Corporate Social Responsibility and Financial Performance: Empirical Evidence from Chemical Industry in Shanghai Stock Exchange

With the development and progress of Chinese society and the rapid spread of information, Chinese chemical companies are constantly experiencing scandalous events such as dangerous chemical spills, water pollution and other phenomena of social interests. This links with the performance of the corresponding social responsibility. These events have spurred people's attention and awareness of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Due to the recent scandals, some enterprises in China pay more and more attention to CSR while paying attention to operating profits. Based on the current research status, this paper proposes the research theme to study the impact of CSR information disclosure on business performance. This article combines research from Western countries with China-based or Chinese research. First of all, after consulting a large number of literatures, it is found that research on social responsibility information disclosure in Western countries is systematic and comprehensive. In addition to the in-depth study of the definition, disclosure content and methods of social responsibility information, the disclosure of social responsibility information. There are also many related studies on the impact of corporate performance, and China's current research has just started, mainly at the level of normative research. After the agency theory and stakeholder theoretical analysis, the disclosure of social responsibility information is classified according to different stakeholders. The main stakeholders are the external stakeholders, this provides a theoretical basis for empirical research. This paper introduces the index method, which measures the CSRD of different dimensions. Then, this paper focuses on the description of the current status of social responsibility information disclosure of listed companies in China, considering the existing problems and the reasons for these problems. At the core of the paper, an empirical study was conducted. In the empirical analysis, this paper studies the relationship between the CSRD of listed Chinese companies on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and Financial Performance (FP). The 52 chemical companies listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange were selected as research objects to study the impact of their release of the social responsibility report in 2013-2018 on business performance, and use STATA for regression analysis. The results of empirical studies indicate that most Chinese companies have deviations in the level of disclosure of environmental CSR information. Although the customer dimension and the overall CSRD have a significant positive impact on firm performance, the results show that the environmental dimension is negatively correlated with FP, and government and social welfare are not related to FP. Finally, based on the analysis of the status quo of CSR information disclosure and the empirical results of this paper, the paper puts forward corresponding research conclusions and puts forward some policy recommendations: the Chinese government needs to improve the disclosure laws and regulations of social responsibility information to constrain and standardize social responsibility reports, give rewards and punishments, etc. At the end of this paper, the shortcomings and limitations of this paper are presented. Key words: corporate social responsibility; information disclosure; financial performance; chemical industry