| Louis Brandeis, the big justice of the United States, had wrote that "Openness is the medicine for the modern society and the industrial ills, sunlight is the best preservative, lighting is the best police officers." in his book "Other People's Money and How the Bankers Use It" in 1914. As a concrete manifestation of the principle of openness, sufficient and effective information disclosure will be the base of an effective capital market. Information disclosure would be divided into mandatory disclosure and voluntary disclosure, according to whether it is controlled. Voluntary disclosure is the actively disclosure of the listed company, in order to enhance the corporate image, improve the investor relationships, avoid the litigation risk and so on (He Weidong,2003). According to the signal theory, voluntary disclosure can build a bridge between the listed companies and the investors to introduce and explain the companies' core competencies to enable the investors make scientific and rational evaluation about the development potential of the companies, and thus make right investment decisions to make capital allocation more efficient. Meanwhile, the scholars who study corporate governance believe that the internal governance, external governance and information disclosure form a complete framework for corporate governance structure. The enhancement of the level of information disclosure is helpful to stimulate the managers, put the external manager market pressure and the reputation incentives to them to achieve external governance and enhance corporate value.Foreign scholars began to paid attention to the voluntary disclosure since 1960s and have got fruitful research fruits. The most representative research in the United States is the report "Improving Business Reporting-A Customer Focus" issued by the Association of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) in 1994, this report summarized the investors' requirements from 10 aspects. In 2001, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) released a research report "Improving Business Reporting:Insights into Enhancing Voluntary Disclosures", the report shows that in petroleum, chemical, computer and other 5 industries voluntary disclosure mainly centre about the "core competitiveness". In China, voluntary disclosure is still a new thing. On November 11,2003 the Shenzhen Stock Exchange released "the investor relationship management guidelines for Shenzhen Stock Exchange companies", in this guideline the concept of voluntary disclosure was introduced in China for the first time. Now China's capital market is rapidly developing, the investors' information needs is expanding and becoming more and more diversified, enhancing the study of voluntary disclosure is very important to perfect the information disclosure system of listed companies, to protect the interests of investors. It has far-reaching theoretical significance and broad practical significance.In this thesis, I selected the annual report of listed companies as research project, learned form the Botosan's research, and referred to the standard "the No.2 Standard of the Content and Format of the Information Disclosure for Public Company-the content and format of the annual report" issued by the China Securities Regulatory Commission, deleted mandatory disclosure projects set by the "the content and format of the annual report", increased the voluntary disclosure projects encouraged by "the content and format of the annual report" to build up a voluntary disclosure index for China's listed companies as the quantity dimension of the voluntary disclosure. By the same time, I chose the information disclosure rating result made by the Shenzhen Stock Exchange as the quality dimension of the voluntary disclosure. And then I multiplied the quantity dimension by the quality dimension and use the result to measure the level of the voluntary disclosure of China's listed companies. I made an empirical study on the impact factors and economic consequences of the voluntary disclosure and reached the following main conclusions:(1) The level of voluntary disclosure of the listed companies is very low. According to the descriptive statistics, the maximum value of the level of voluntary disclosure is 31.8182%, the minimum value is only 0.6818%, and the mean is 12.3654%. In particular, the maximum value of quantity dimensions is 36.3501%, the minimum value is 1.1364%, and the mean value is 15.8786%, indicating that voluntary disclosure will of listed companies is weak; there are 70 companies rated by the Shenzhen Stock Exchange as "excellent",315 companies rated as "good", the excellent and good rate is only 74.18%, and the mean value of the quality dimension of the voluntary disclosure was declining form 2005-2007, we must certainly be vigilant.(2) There are significant positive correlations between the voluntary disclosure level and the proportion of independent director, the audit committee, the company size, the company growth, the stock issuing type. There are significant positive correlations between the quantity dimension of the voluntary disclosure and the industry type, the proportion of independent director, the audit committee, the company size, the company growth, the he stock issuing type. There are significant positive correlations between the quality dimension of the voluntary disclosure and the percentage of institutional investor ownership, the stock concentration, the proportion of independent director, the audit committee, the company performance, the company growth; but there is significant positive correlation between the quality dimension of the voluntary disclosure and the percentage of state ownership. In addition, I also focused on the impact of the accounting independent directors, the part-time of the board secretary and the quality of accounting information on the voluntary disclosure, the study found:there is no significant correlation between accounting independent directors and the voluntary disclosure level and the quality dimensions, but there is a significant correlation between accounting independent directors and the quality dimension; when the board secretaries only doubling as director or vice president, they can do noting to do the level of voluntary disclosure, the quantity dimension and the quality dimension, but when the board secretaries doubling as director and vice president at the same time, they could enhance the level of the voluntary disclosure, the quantity dimension and the quality dimension; there is on significant correlation between discretionary accruals and the level of voluntary disclosure of information, the quantity dimension and the quality dimension there is no direct relationship between the quality of accounting information and the level of voluntary disclosure.(3) I examined the relationship between the voluntary disclosure and the stock price from investors'perspective. Using the event study method, I chose two event window [-5,5] and [-10,10], ranked the 173 sample companies in order of the level of the voluntary disclosure, and chose the first 50 companies as "high group" and the last 50 companies as "low group" in 2005-2007. The result shows that in 2005 and 2006 the CAAR_H was significantly higher than the CAAR_L, but in 2007 the difference between them was not significant. In order to analyze the relationship between the level of the voluntary disclosure and the CAAR in depth, I also set a multiple regression analysis model, the result shows that there are significant positive correlations between the CAAR and the level of the voluntary disclosure and the quantity dimension, but there is no significant positive correlations between CAAR and the quality dimension in [-5,5] and [-10,10]. It means that after several years of experience, China's investors are becoming mature; they are more and more sensitive to the high-quality disclosure and able to accurately identify the level of quality of information. Simplely releasing of large amounts of information to the market, but not focusing on the quality of information will not have the desired effect will not have paositive impact on the stock price.(4) I examined the relationship between the voluntary disclosure and the corporate value from the perspective of the listed companies. Firstly I used parametric test and the Mann-Whitney Signed-rank Test to test the difference and the significance of the mean of two samples. The result show that one year lagged corporate value of the "high group" is significantly higher than the "low group" in 2005-2007. Secondly, I carried out a multiple regression analysis. The result shows that there are significantly positive correlations between the corporate value and the level of the voluntary disclosure, the quantity dimension and the quality dimension. It means increasing the level of the voluntary disclosure would be helpful to reduce the information asymmetry and enhance the liquidity of the stock and lower capital cost; be helpful to ease the proxy conflict, improve the corporate governance structure and improve corporate value.(5) I examined the relationship between the voluntary disclosure and the executive pay from the managers'perspective. Firstly, I curried out a grouping test, the results of the parameter test and non-parametric test both show that the total remuneration and the remuneration top three managers of the "high group" are both significantly higher than the "low group" in 2007 and 2008, but in 2006 there is no significant difference between the "high group" and the "low group". In order to reveal the relationship between the voluntary disclosure and the executive pay, I established a multiple regression model to analyze in depth. The result of the multiple regression analysis shows that there are significant positive correlations between the total remuneration, the remuneration of the top three managers and the level of voluntary disclosure, the quantity dimension and the quality dimension. It means that increasing the level of voluntary disclosure would be helpful to reduce the information asymmetry, alleviate agency conflict, improve the corporate governance structure, improve corporate performance, and increase executive pay.Finally, I concluded and summarized the results of empirical analysis comprehensively and put forward some policy proposals about how to enhance the level of the voluntary disclosure and hoped it would be helpful for the policy-making of the regulatory and the strategic-choosing of the listed companies.
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