An Empirical Study On The Voluntary Accounting Policy Changes Of Chinese Listed Companies

Voluntary accounting policy change is among the core content of the research of positive accounting theory. Ever since the emergence of effective market hypothesis (EPH) and capital asset pricing model (CAPM), lots of fruitful studies have been made by overseas accounting scholars. However, to a large extent, these studies neglected the inherent characteristics of countries in economic transformation. Therefore, the aim to explain and predict the accounting practice of countries in economic transformation could not be reached.Based on the above mentioned reasons, a series of theoretic and practical problems of earnings management, contract motivation, market response and auditing authentication were discussed in this paper by methods of theoretic analysis and empirical testing. Then, theoretic support and policy suggestions were provided for the supervision of stock market of Chinese listed companies.There are three parts in this paper. Corresponding contents and conclusions are as follows:First part of this paper includes chapter 2 and chapter 3. Based on the introduction & review of the theoretic controversy among selective inauthentic financial disclosure hypothesis, enterprise contract theory, economic consequence theory, non-effect hypothesis and mechanicalness hypothesis, the relationship among above mentioned theories(or theoretic hypothesis), accounting information and voluntary accounting policy change were discussed in chapter 2. In chapter 3, the conceptual framework concerning voluntary accounting policy change was discussed by normative approach. Pertinent institutional background of voluntary accounting policy change of Chinese listed companies was analyzed. The framework of the following chapters which were mainly concerned about positive analysis was constructed. Three reasons why the consistency principle must be insisted on and the more comprehensive viewpoint of "Generalized Accounting Policy Consistency Theory" as well as basic reasons why this paper was apt to mechanicalness hypothesis were put forward.Second part of this paper includes chapter 4, 5, 6 and 7 and it is the core of this paper. In chapter 4, through one by one matching between research samples and controlled samples, the emergence cause of Chinese listed companies' behaviors of income smoothing, huge amount of write off and earnings management induced by policy-based factors were testified by methods of mean value test, Wilcoxon signed-rank test and Logistic regression. The result shows that there exist behaviors of income smoothing, huge amount of write off and earnings management induced by policy-based factors in Chinese listed companies as a whole. The behavior of income smoothing has profit incremental characteristic and its influential factors include enterprise's scale, fee charging limitation and pay contract which correlate positively with it. The influential factors of huge amount write off include enterprise's scale which correlates negatively with it and the changing proportion of directors which correlates positively with it. Besides the policy-based inducing factor, the influential factors of earnings management induced by policy-based factors also include political cost and debt contract which correlate negatively with it as well as pay contract and the scale of accounting firms which correlate positively with it.In chapter 5, firstly, based on one by one matching between research samples and controlled samples, the primary influential factors of voluntary accounting policy change were testified by methods of single variable test and Logistic regression. Then, the degree of voluntary accounting policy change of research samples was analyzed by multiple linear regression method. Finally, through result of empirical test and problem discussion, it shows that the pay contract hypothesis is validated in the signed test level of voluntary accounting policy change, hypotheses of political cost, debt contract and dividend limitation are validated in the degree test level of voluntary accounting policy cha...