The impact of biodiversity information disclosure on analyst forecast quality: empirical evidence from China

Biodiversity information, as an important part of the risk information and sustainable development information framework, its disclosure rules, behaviors and quality research have become major issues at present. This paper is the first to examine the impact of Chinese listed companies’ biodiversity information disclosure on analyst forecast quality. The findings are as follows: (1) biodiversity information disclosure increases analyst forecast errors and dispersion, thereby reducing the analyst forecast quality; (2) The mechanism results show that biodiversity information disclosure reduces analyst forecast quality by increasing information asymmetry between companies and external stakeholders, enhancing the uncertainty of internal operating levels and increasing the complexity of the textual information in the annual report; (3) The heterogeneity analysis shows that the impact of biodiversity information disclosure on reducing analyst forecast quality is more significant for regions with high attention to local ecological civilization. Meanwhile, the implementation of ecological reward and punishment mechanisms can weaken the negative impact of biodiversity information disclosure on analyst forecast quality, thereby enhancing the decision-usefulness of biodiversity information disclosure to a certain extent. In addition, among companies that have environmental violations, the level of biodiversity disclosure further reduces analyst forecast quality.