ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Stock Market’s Reaction to Self-Disclosure
of Environmental Administrative Penalties:
an Empirical Study in China
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School of Economics and Management, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China
Submission date: 2019-10-31
Final revision date: 2020-02-28
Acceptance date: 2020-02-29
Online publication date: 2020-05-22
Publication date: 2020-08-05
Corresponding author
Ying Qu
School of Economics and Management, Dalian University of Technology, China
Pol. J. Environ. Stud. 2020;29(6):4029-4039
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ABSTRACT
For a listed company the information about self-disclosing its environmental penalty will provide
investors with reliable sources to observe its environmental situation. This study, employing the
event study method, examines the stock market’s reaction before and after its environmental penalty
announcement. The impacts of environmental penalties on companies’ abnormal returns during the
observation period are evaluated as well. The findings reveal that the accumulative abnormal returns
of penalized companies will drop before the environmental penalty announcements. Besides, selfdisclosing
the environmental penalty will ease the negative impacts on their abnormal returns, and
the disclosure of detailed rectification measures and the impacts of penalty in the announcements will
increase their abnormal returns as opposed to bring further damage to their stock market returns.
Our results suggest that the self-disclosure of penalty information prevents the decline of stock market
returns, which implies that self-disclosure has a positive effect on companies’ reactions in terms of
market value.