An Exploratory Study On The Application Of XBRL In China's Enterprise: Determinants And Financial Impact

With the rapid development of information and network technology, we have come to a high information technology era. In order to adapt to this change, the way for accounting information announcement has also changed greatly. The emerge of IFR (Internet Financial Report) in 1990s completely broke through the limitations of traditional paper-based financial reporting, and improved the way and efficiency of the accounting information announcement. However, with the development of network technology, the shortness of traditional internet financial report becomes more and more distinctive. Since different companies may choose different accounting software, the output format may also varies such as HTML, PDF, EXCEL etc. Therefore the different and incompatible format has brings lots of troubles to the users of the internet financial report. In this context, XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) which is based on XML (extensible standard extensible makeup Language) was born in 1998. Through add the tag to the accounting information, XBRL makes the financial information generated by different software can be integrated to identify; It overcomes the deficiencies of traditional internet financial report, therefore, it received widely attention around the world. At present, China has forced all the listed companies sending annual report by apply the XBRL standard, but the enthusiasm of other enterprises apply the XBRL standard report disclosure finance information are not very high. As with so much advantage of XBRL, why some companies are willing to apply XBRL technology, some companies are unwilling to be applied? And whether XBRL technology will have a positive financial impact to the company? It is based on the thinking of these issues, the paper based on the reality of China does an empirical study, we selected 94 listed companies from Shanghai Stock Exchange which are the first application of XBRL standard technology.This article based on the analysis of the listed companies which voluntarily use XBRL in china as a starting point, then do an empirical test about the factors affecting of the listed companies in China to use XBRL, The article first review of related literatures, Because XBRL belongs to the internet financial report, therefore this paper based on relevant literature review of the deciding factor about internet financial report as the starting point of the research. This article first carries on the research of determining factor related to internet financial report combs. Secondly, the bases of theoretical studies on XBRL are summarized. Subsequently, we carried on the theoretical analysis about the determinants and financial impact of the application of XBRL. Firstly, through the item accounting theory's elaboration, we has obtained the rationale which XBRL produces, next, defined the related concepts of the XBRL, And summarized the three stages about the development of the internet financial reports. Subsequently, agency theory and signal theory are introduced, Then, through the analytic applications about agency theory and signal theory, combined with the actual situation of China's listed companies, the paper puts forward three research hypotheses, Respectively are:①there are industry differences in the company which are voluntary to application XBRL;②The voluntary implementation of XBRL are related to the size and the performance and Asset-liability ratio of the company;③Application of XBRL can improve the company's market value and operational efficiency. On this basis, the paper firstly use descriptive statistical methods to analysis the common characteristics of the earliest companies that use XBRL, Secondly, the application (Kruskal-Wallish) H non-parameter test to analyze whether there are industry difference existing in the voluntarily implemented of XBRL, Then Logistic regression applied, to test whether these characteristics are relevant to the application of XBRL reporting standards or not, Thirdly, apply of the Wilcoxon test to exam Whether the application of XBRL reporting standards will have a positive financial impact. Finally, based on the summarize of empirical results, the limitations and future research direction for further empirical is proposed, and propose appropriate countermeasures about how to promote XBRL in a better application and popularization in China. And I hope to provide some reference and inspiration to the application of XBRL in China.The contribution of this article is that we found through research that the affect of industry factor in the course of application of XBRL in China is not obvious. Generally, the companies with large scale and good performance tend to apply voluntary XBRL technology standards to disclose financial information. At the same time, through examining, the article also found that voluntary application of XBRL technical standards can have a positive impact on the operational efficiency of a company.