The Impact of Environmental Information Disclosure on the Efficiency of Enterprise Capital Allocation
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
1. There is not an objective of the research
2. There are not discuss with the authors
3. How did you match the hypothesis with results?
4. Methodology???
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thank you very much for your comments on our manuscript, and we have revised the manuscript in accordance with your comments, we respond to your questions one by one as follows.
Point 1: There is not an objective of the research.
Response 1: Thank you very much for your suggestion, according to your advice, we modified the content of the Literature Review and Research Hypothesis section. Specifically, we extended the relevant literature to illustrate the research gap in existing studies and our study objective, and the main objective is to explore the influence of ED on corporate CAE and further investigate its specific influence mechanism. (See the line 81-98 of the revised manuscript for details.)
Point 2: There are not discuss with the authors.
Response 2: Thank you very much for pointing out this problem, we modified the title of the fourth section to “Results and discussion” and further discussed the similarity and differences with previous studies in section 4.6. (See lines 509-524 of the revised manuscript for details.)
(See line 517-532 of the revised manuscript for details.)
Point 3: How did you match the hypothesis with results?
Response 3: We sincerely appreciate your suggestion. In the empirical analysis, this study examines the six hypotheses proposed in the section “Literature Review and Research Hypothesis”. Firstly, in Section 4.2, "The impact of ED on CAE of enterprises," we conduct an initial examination of hypothesis H1. Since this hypothesis forms the foundation of our study, we further subject it to multiple robustness tests in Section 4.3. Moreover, hypotheses H2, H3, H4, and H5 are individually tested in Section 4.4, "Heterogeneity analysis." Lastly, hypothesis H6 is examined in Section 4.5, "Stakeholders' moderating role."
Point 4: Methodology?
Response 4: Actually, our manuscript provides a detailed exposition of the research design, wherein the employed methodology is presented. The econometric model used in this study is the fixed-effects panel regression model, a well-established approach in Econometrics (Equations (1) and (2)). Furthermore, in the section exploring the moderating role of stakeholders, a similar model is applied for analysis (Equations (3) -(5)). The meaning of each parameter in the model is elaborated upon in the respective sections. According to your valuable suggestion, we have revised the title of the research design section to "Methodology" to enhance clarity and facilitate comprehension. (See lines 245-338 of the revised manuscript for details.)
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear authors,
Thank you for sending your paper to the journal. The paper deal with a good topic with an interesting objective with econometric modeling and data from heavily polluting enterprises in Chinese A-shares between 2013 and 2020 to explore the impact of environmental information disclosure on capital allocation efficiency, as well as its mechanisms.
Overall assessment and concerns:
1- Hypotheses H1a and H1b seem to be confusing; in other words, if you test the H1a, there is no need to test H1b, even if there is no need to postulate such a hypothesis. So that one of the mentioned hypotheses should be entirely deleted from the paper body and even the testing of such hypothesis should be deleted.
2-The theoretical issues are far from supporting all hypotheses. It is strongly recommended to improve this part as much as possible by the most recent studies; some are listed here but do not satisfy the mentioned references:
-Promote or Crowd Out? The Impact of Environmental Information Disclosure Methods on Enterprise Value
-Nonfinancial sustainability reporting, management legitimate authority and enterprise value
-The Effect of CO2 Gas Emissions on the Market Value, Price and Shares Returns
-Sustainability Reporting and Corporate Reputation: The Moderating Effect of CEO Opportunistic Behavior
-A framework for business sustainability performance using meta-synthesis
Needs minor revision
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thank you very much for your comments on our manuscript, and we have revised the manuscript in accordance with your comments, we respond to your questions one by one as follows.
Point 1: Hypotheses H1a and H1b seem to be confusing; in other words, if you test the H1a, there is no need to test H1b, even if there is no need to postulate such a hypothesis. So that one of the mentioned hypotheses should be entirely deleted from the paper body and even the testing of such hypothesis should be deleted.
Response 1: Thank you very much for your suggestion. We have adjusted our research hypotheses accordingly and, in addition, removed hypothesis H1a from the manuscript. (See lines 79-111 of the revised manuscript for details.)
Point 2: The theoretical issues are far from supporting all hypotheses. It is strongly recommended to improve this part as much as possible by the most recent studies.
Response 2: Thank you for pointing out this issue. We appreciate your advice. Following your suggestion, we have supplemented the theoretical framework of the manuscript by referencing recent research in relevant field. (See lines 79-111 of the revised manuscript for details.)
Reviewer 3 Report
I have read the interesting paper" The impact of environmental infomration disclosure on the efficiency of enterprise capital allocation" and I think that the paper has a good literature review and an interesting empirical application. The only recommendation is to show in a more clear form the data used in the empirical study because it is not clear where the 4998 observations were obtained. That is, the data are annualy, daily,.... and how many enterprise has been considered, 14?
Moreover, when the observations are grouped the sum of the number of observations is not the total observations. You must show information about the lost information.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thank you very much for your comments on our manuscript, and we have revised the manuscript in accordance with your comments, we respond to your questions one by one as follows.
Point 1: To show in a more clear form the data used in the empirical study because it is not clear where the 4998 observations were obtained. That is, the data are annualy, and daily, and how many enterprises has been considered? Moreover, when the observations are grouped the sum of the number of observations is not the total observations. You must show information about the lost information.
Response 1: Firstly, our research sample consists of 590 companies, and we used annual data from 2013 to 2020. The final sample comprises 4,230 observations, and we have explained this in the article. (See lines 269-270 of the revised manuscript for details.)
Additionally, the mention of 4,998 observations in the initial version of the manuscript was an error. As you have correctly pointed out, we made several revisions to the manuscript before submission. However, due to our oversight, it resulted in inconsistencies between the earlier and final versions of the article. We sincerely appreciate you bringing this issue to our attention.
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Good morning
The discussion should be reviewed. Discussion and conclusions are point 5.
Please review the discussion and include authors
Author Response
Dear Reviewer，
Thank you very much for reviewing our manuscript again, and we have revised the manuscript in accordance with your comments, we respond to your questions one by one as follows.
Point 1: The discussion should be reviewed. Discussion and conclusions are point 5. Please review the discussion and include authors
Response 1: Thank you very much for pointing this out, and as you suggested, we have added a discussion in the fifth part of the article and compared it with the findings of other similar studies. In addition, we have also changed the title of section 5. (See line 516 and lines 599-617 of the revised manuscript for details.)
Thank you again for your careful review of our manuscript.
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear authors,
The current version looks sound and you revised the paper according to my comments.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer，
Thank you very much for reviewing our manuscript again, we've made some adjustments to the paper, and your suggestions have greatly improved the quality of our paper, thank you very much!
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Round 3
Reviewer 1 Report
Good job
