The Research On Listed Companies' Information Disclosure From The Industry Angle

Samuel Johnson once said, "Where secrecy or mystery begins, vice or roguery is not far off." Secrecy often creates mistrust where information cannot be shared. "Information itself is power." With the avalanche of corporate accounting scandals including Enron, WorldCom and Xerox that have been revealed recently, there is an outcry for accounting information disclosure again. The economic environment of industry affects the companies' business. However, the information disclosure of listed companies reflects the economic environment of industries. The question is whether the information disclosure of listed companies in different industries will present different characteristics, or the industry environment will affect the information disclosure of listed companies? In the same industry, how goes it about information disclosure of listed companies with different industry positions? This paper attempts to reveal the problems of information disclosure in listed companies from industry angle and provide some empirical evidences for studying these problems. At the same time, it also provides some suggestions to further improve the information disclosure of listed companies.Firstly, the paper defines the method to differentiate voluntary information disclosure from mandatory information disclosure. Secondly, the paper employs the Signaling Theory, the Cost-Benefit Analysis and the Game Theory to analyze the impact of disclosed industry information on information disclosure of listed companies, which provides theoretical foundation for further analysis. Thirdly, this paper uses the published data in 2005 from the Shenzhen Stock Exchange to empirically study information disclosure of listed companies from industry angle. The empirical research is divided into two parts: The first part is to evaluate mandatory information disclosure of listed companies from industry angle in Shenzhen Stock Exchange, thus to compare the relationship between the evaluated ranking of information disclosure and the corporate size etc. in different industries. The industry distribution and the industry characteristic of violated listed companies are also discussed. The second part is to evaluate voluntary information disclosure of listed companies in Shenzhen Stock Exchange from industry angle and to analyze the impact of some industry's characteristics on listed companies' voluntary information disclosure. Finally, this paper proposes some suggestions for improving information disclosure of listed...