The Impact Mechanism of Environmental Information Disclosure on Corporate Sustainability Performance—Micro-Evidence from China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The topic is interesting and meaningful with SDGs-2030, theme and the title look fine because of this, I feel this manuscript can be considered for publishing in the Sustainability journal. However, the authors look a bit new to the system of the journal or new in the research area as the formation and presentation of the manuscript are not up to the mark of journal instructions or research process. Therefore, the following changes should be addressed carefully before its acceptance.

* First and foremost, follow the author's guidelines regarding the formatting of the manuscript.

*Abstract section should deal with the problem under concern, then the process of evaluating this problem, then outcomes of this evaluation process and finally policy recommendations based on that process and I think it should be rounding words from 150-200

* introduction section should deal with MRCI (Motivation, Rationale, Contribution and Implication).

*add a paragraph at the end of the result section to conclude the whole evaluation process and summarize it.

* discussion section should be a separate section from the conclusion. in this section (discussion), give brief details in a common language for the public reader of the technical process adopted in the result section. add citations which advocate your results and finally add future perspective in this area of research.

*add a policy recommendation/suggestion section in the conclusion section to advise the policymakers regarding the relationship between education and poverty.

Author Response

Dear Reviewers,

    Thank you very much for your valuable comments on this article during your busy time, and we have carefully revised according to it. Please see the attachment and the new manuscript version for details of the changes.

Thanks again for your contribution to this article! Have a good day!

Sincerely,
PhD. Ye Lyu

Institute of Industrial Management, Economics and Trade Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, Saint Petersburg, 195220, Russia

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

1. This paper studies the relationship among environmental information disclosure, green innovation, and corporate sustainability performance, which indicates that green innovation plays a mediating role in this relationship, and financing constraints and female directors play the moderation effects. However, as far as I know, there are many extant studies focusing on this relationship, and investigating the internal mechanism, especially, the moderating effect of financing constraints. The innovation of this study is not high.

2.  The reason of addressing the moderating effect of financing constraints and female directors is not detailed. You should address why you focus on the two variables simultaneously, and from which perspective, why you don't care about other variables, such as the structure of the board and so on.

3. The conceptual model is imperfect.  Why you introduce debt financing and equity financing on the H1 and H2 of the conceptual model, and disappear on the part of formulating hypotheses? And it also disappears on the part of variables identification.

4. why don't financing constraints and female directors play the moderating effect on the relationship between green innovation and corporate sustainable performance?

5. The method of verifying the mediating effect of green innovation is incorrect. 

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Author Response

Dear Reviewers,

    Thank you very much for your valuable comments on this article during your busy time, and we have carefully revised according to it. Please see the attachment and the new manuscript version for details of the changes.

Thanks again for your contribution to this article! Have a good day!

Sincerely,
PhD. Ye Lyu

Institute of Industrial Management, Economics and Trade Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, Saint Petersburg, 195220, Russia

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

An important and interesting topic is presented in the manuscript, because it empirically analyses the logical relationship between environmental information disclosure, green innovation and corporate sustainability performance using balanced panel data of Chinese A-share listed manufacturing companies from 2015 to 2020. The quality of the writing and overall quality of the content are high. The statistical methods are valid and correctly applied. I think this study to be of interest and worthy for publication in Sustainability. It is better to (1) optimize the conceptual model to more pretty, (2) add citation about CNRDS, CSMAR, and WIND database, (3) further combine the policy implications with the research conclusion.

Author Response

Dear Reviewers,

    Thank you very much for your valuable comments on this article during your busy time, and we have carefully revised according to it. Please see the attachment and the new manuscript version for details of the changes.

Thanks again for your contribution to this article! Have a good day!

Sincerely,
PhD. Ye Lyu

Institute of Industrial Management, Economics and Trade Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, Saint Petersburg, 195220, Russia

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to review the paper.

I somewhat enjoyed reading the article entitled “Does environmental information disclosure improve corporate sustainability performance? Micro evidence from China”. I applaud for authors’ efforts. However, I have some Major considerations, and I offer the following comments, hoping these will help the authors to improve their research.

1.Title “Does environmental information disclosure improve corporate sustainability performance? Micro evidence from China” does reflect the essence of the article, but I suggest correct it a little in order to reflect better the research. Now the title gives guessing that it will be the research only about the impact of environmental information disclosure on corporate sustainability performance, but the research is broader.

2.Abstract and introduction. I didn’t find the exact shortly formulated the purpose of this research including all aspects in one sentence in the introduction. Then this problem is continued in abstract and conclusions. Abstract should be reviewed and corrected because I found some controversial statements compared with the text. Keywords are good. In the introduction, showing the research gap, the citations of mostly Chinese authors were found. It is very strange because the literature in research field should be analyzed worldwide.

I found in the theoretical analysis some expressions like “some scholars”, “more scholars”. I suggest to write exactly “who” giving particular sources.

3. Structure. The structure of the article fulfills the requirements of this journal and scientific paper.

I didn’t find the exact number of companies analyzed in research, only number of observations.

What is “ST or *ST” in 3.1. subsection? “SA index” in 3.2.4 subsection?

Table 1 and table 2 are mixed up.

Dependent and independent variables are usually used instead of explanatory and explained variables.

4. Conclusions and Discussion. I suggest to review discussion part from the beginning and present more theoretical and practical implications of the results. Check these sentences: “Environmental information disclosure is important to study the economic consequences of environmental information disclosure as one of the informal forms of environmental regulation.” , “This paper finds mediated mediating effects..”

I also find very short limitations of this study and directions for further research.

 

The main problem. I invite authors to think more on the logic of empirical model (formulas), expressions, writing in all text how environmental information discosure can improve/reflect/effect/impact environmental company performance. First of all, company takes some steps improving environmental performance and then disclose this information in annual financial and non-financial statements. So environmental performance and disclosure are very related and should be similar, unless we are looking at the practical problem of whether the disclosure is in line with the actual situation, i.e. no greenwashing. Therefore, I doubt how information disclosure itself can improve the subject it presents and describes. So authors should be very careful in stating that information disclosure itself improves something directly in company, because mostly we can find just relationships between these variables, but not influence one on another.

Author Response

Dear Reviewers,

    Thank you very much for your valuable comments on this article during your busy time, and we have carefully revised according to it. Please see the attachment and the new manuscript version for details of the changes.

Thanks again for your contribution to this article! Have a good day!

Sincerely,
PhD. Ye Lyu

Institute of Industrial Management, Economics and Trade Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, Saint Petersburg, 195220, Russia

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 4 Report

Dear authors, 

Thank you for all corrections - these really make manuscript better. 

I have some comments according the final version of article:

1. The new title is much better, but almost every article contains some kind of exploring, so I think we don't need to write in the title "Exploring..." . I suggest to leave the title without the first word.

2. Citation of sources is still not correct in some places. Where authors write the surname and year of the source, they also write the number of the source.  But in Sustainability journal citation has other format, and we need to write surnames and numbers of sources. Please, look at other articles or rules of citation and correct sources in 73, 99, 135, 139, 143, 172, 151, 156, 176, 186, 189, 190, 214, 217, 237, 238, 240, 241, 597 rows.

3. I still didn't find the purpose of the research in one sentence in the introduction...

4. I suggest to put table 2 to Annex in the end of the article. 

5. Authors write first time abbreviation SOE's and no-SOE's in 483 row without explanation what it is. Usually in scientific  articles we write full term first and present its abbreviation, later use only abbreviation. This should be with "SOE". Additionally, in 551, 593 rows, the term "non-state owned enterprises" is written full. There should be consistent use of abbreviations.  

6. The term "win-win" was mentioned in the article four times, but two times it is enclosed in quotation marks and other two times is not.  Should be equally.

Best regards,

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer.

Thank you for your valuable comments. Honestly, we have benefited a lot. According to your comments we have carefully revised each item. Please review it again.

Thank you again for your contribution to this paper!

Best regards!

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf