An Empirical Research On Voluntary Disclosure Of Segment Information Of Chinese Listed Companies

"Accounting Standards for Business Enterprises: Segment Reporting (draft for comments)" was enacted to restrict the disclosure behavior of segment reporting by Ministry of Finance in 2001, and was implemented from Jan. 2003.This thesis mainly pays attention to if the segment information disclosure behaviors in the 2004 annual reports of A share companies listed on Shanghai Stock Exchange and Shenzhen Stock Exchange have been improved after the implement of the Segment Reporting (draft for comments) in 2003: if they voluntarily disclose more segment Information, such as segment assets, segment liabilities, capital expenditure, depreciation and amortization and so on. Based on the segment information in the 2004 annual reports, 26 ones are defined as voluntary disclosure diversified companies. And the approach of paired sampling is used to control the influence of asset size, leverage and listing place. Then the Logistic model is used to examine the influential factors of voluntary disclosure of more segment information, and logit analysis suggest that voluntary segment disclosure is significantly related to ownership diffusion and overseas listing (whether to issue B share or H share), but no support is found for profitability, the establishment of auditing committee and diversification strategy.In the last part, to improve the system of segment information disclosure, this paper puts forward some suggestions with regard to the regulation of segment disclosure by China Securities Regulatory Commission.