Research On Voluntary Disclosure Of Annual Budget Information Of Listed Companies And Its Reliability

Information disclosure of listed companies is the bridge and bond between internal and external market of enterprises. Generally, it refers to the important information of listed companies which directly or indirectly affects decisions of investors, and it is provided to persons with relevant interests or who will use the information in the form of open report. Its major goal is to release enterprise information to outsiders, to introduce and explain investment potential of the company to investors, so as to enhance investor confidence, to improve or maintain company images, to avoid litigation risks, to stimulate the flow of capital market, to allocate resources effectively, to reduce capital costs and so on. Budgetary information is the information that is used to forecast, and it is regarded as internal accounting information of companies all the time, not in the scope of compulsory disclosure, resulting in the low relevance of budgetary information. However, with increasing uncertainty of external environment, the demand for budgetary information by external users of accounting information is increasing. Meanwhile, externalization of budgetary information can reduce information asymmetry, strengthen the effectiveness of management control, boost relevance and reliability of budgetary information so that information users can make reasonable economic decisions.Based on existing researches, this paper focuses on the research on about voluntary disclosure of budgetary information and its reliability so as to fill up the blank of this field, and obtains the following conclusions: (1)the percentage of companies which voluntarily disclose budgetary as a share of total listed companies is not high, only one third, but this trend is strengthened gradually; (2)agent costs are significantly negatively correlated to voluntary disclosure of budgetary information, the higher the agent costs, the lower the willingness of the enterprise management to disclose budgetary information; (3)features of budgetary information is significantly positively correlated to voluntary disclosure of budgetary information, when a company has good news, it is more willing to disclosure its budget; (4)features of companies are significantly positively correlated to voluntary disclosure of budgetary information, state-owned enterprises are more willing to do so than private companies; (5)the scale of the monitoring committee is significantly positively correlated with the disclosure, the larger the scale, the more effective the monitor and the restraint upon management behaviors; (6)properties of industries is relevant with the disclosure, manufacturing companies are more willing to do so than non manufacturing ones; (7)nearly half of the disclosure of listed companies in our country is accurate, but generally, budgetary reliability is moderate; (8)agent costs are significantly positively correlated with budget errors, the higher the agent costs, the more inaccurate the budget, the lower the budget reliability; (9)companies that have good news are significantly negatively correlated with budget errors, the smaller the errors of companies that have good news, the higher the reliability; (10)the auditing in the four international accounting firms is significantly negatively correlated with budget errors, the companies that have been audited by the four firms have lower budget errors and a higher reliability; (11)financial leverage is significantly positively correlated with budget errors, the higher the asset-liability ratio of companies, the bigger the budget errors, the lower the reliability, although they are willing to disclose budgetary information.