The Research On The Way Of Disclosure Of Listed Firms' Annual Report

Information plays an important role in the security exchange. Stock price is mainly determined based on information. Financial disclosure is a primary way for listed firms signaling their performance. Market reactions to information announced by listed firms have been thoroughly studied. This paper investigates the motives for choosing different ways of financial disclosure. Using 1200 annual report disclosure of A share listed firms as a sample, the relationship between earnings information and the choice of timing and media of annual report disclosure is analyzed.Some descriptive statistics regarding the way of disclosure of 2002 annual report are presented at first. Then I divided the 1200 samples into several groups on the basis of disclosure choice. The relationship between the earnings information and the disclosure choice are investigated with T test and ANOVA test. I also tried to explore the motivation behind the disclosure choice.The result in this paper shows that the disclosure choice depends on the earnings information. The more profitable firms tend to disclose their annual report on more medias, and they tend to disclose earlier. However, it seems that they don't pay much attention on which media to disclose. I also find that loss firms tend to disclose their annual report just before the deadline. Furthermore, most of the firms disclose their annual report on the media that with the same location of the stock exchange.