The Research On Information Environment Of The Listed Company From Information Ecology Perspective

The information environment of listed company is a series of informationcommunication and activities based on firm-specific information. And companies’information environment has direct impact on the stock price reaction to its intrinsicvalue. Recently, with the deepening of financial globalization, the information flowsfaster and faster, and the listed company in the Chinese securities market experiencesrapid growth. However, there are still many problems, and these problems are closelyrelated with the information environment. Under this background, the academia andgovernment give more attention to firm-specific information, but there is still lack ofsystematic analysis. Therefore, it shows important theoretical innovation and realitysignificance that systematically analyzes the information environment of listedcompany.Information ecology theory provides a new perspective for informationmanagement. This study starts with theoretical analysis, followed by empirical researchand then political suggestion. Based on reviewing the relative studies, this dissertationquantitatively researches on the information environment by A-share listed company,and explores information disclosure, transmission and utilization of firm-specificinformation from information ecology perspective.(1) This dissertation defines the information environment of listed company, andespecially, emphasizes listed company is the main information sourse. The informationenvironment includes information disclosure of listed companies, informationtransmission of intermediaries and investment behavior of investors. Meanwhile, thisdissertation reviews the relative informational theory.(2) Based on summarizing the measurement method, this dissertation proposes animproved model by using Chinese listed company data from2002to2011. And theeffectiveness of the model is also examined.(3) This dissertation explores the information environment from three mainsections following information ecology theory. That is information disclosure,information transmission and information utilization. In the section of informationdisclosure, this dissertation calculates an information disclosure quality index withentropy weight coefficient method. And then the evaluation results are applied todescribe information disclosure quality of Chinese securities markets. The empirical result shows that the calculated index has better explanatory power. In the section ofinformation transmission, this dissertation focuses on analysts’ information behavior.And the relation between analyst coverage and the firm-specific information, staranalysts and the firm-specific information, and the impact of market trends are alsoexamined. Considering that the influences of analyst coverage on stock returnsynchronicity may be endogenous, this study also uses the instrumental variable toalleviate this concern. The empirical result indicates that analysts pay more attention onmarket-wide information, while star analysts coverage actually increase stock priceinformativeness. The findings from market trends, however, show that analysts increaseattention on firm-specific information in bull market. After previous procedure, theinformation utilization section is taken into consideration. In the section of informationutilization, this study finds that institutional investors have obvious advantages ininformation processing by comparative analysis with individual investors. And then thisdissertation investigates holdings of institutional investors. The empirical result showsthat institutional ownership and institutional number increase the firm-specificinformation, and have a positive effect on the information environment. However, therelation between institutional investors and crash risk also implicitly indicates the activemonitor hypothesis is not hold in the Chinese securities market.(4) This study reviews core issues in the information environment of Chinese listedcompany, and discusses international experience. Meanwhile, the last context proposesthe political suggestion to improve the information environment from the aspects ofimproving information disclosure quality, regulating securities analysts, strengtheninginstitutional investors and developing information synergistic supervision mechanism,and so on.