Events

Dr. Shipeng Yan
Assistant Professor of Management
City University of Hong Kong

In this paper, we seek to establish regulatory transparency as a critical but overlooked factor that moderates the effectiveness of environmental reporting intervention to drive performance improvement. We contend that environmental reporting as an intervention has the potential to facilitate environmental governance by (1) increasing organizational self-awareness of irresponsible conducts, and (2) amplifying peer pressures through social comparison, but a lack of regulatory transparency could prevent it from enabling performance change. We identify two types of regulatory transparency – outcome transparency and procedural transparency – and theorize how they contribute to the effectiveness of environmental reporting intervention differently. Using novel panel data on the lending activities of 46 Chinese banks in 32 provinces before and after the of Green Credit Initiative, we find that transparency on procedures of regulatory rulemaking (procedural transparency) can be more effective than transparency on outcomes of enforcement records (outcome transparency). Such a difference is more salient among peripheral organizations (joint-stock banks) relative to their dominant counterparts (state banks). We contribute to research on regulatory institutions, environmental governance and organizational change.