An Empirical Analysis Of Differences Of Earnings Quality Between The Private And State-owned Companies

From the form mechanism and theory logic of information disclosure, it should be the behavior of management. But at the stage that the listed companies in China have concentrated corporate ownership, there are usually a large shareholder which is called as controlling shareholder. So the management generally are controlled or affected by controlling shareholder and ultimate controllers. Consequently, information disclosure is more subject to the controlling shareholder and ultimate controllers, and so is the information quality. If controlling shareholder opportunistically seek private benefits of control right, it is more likely that the controlling shareholder would expropriate the minority shareholders through information disclosure.As the reform of the state-owned enterprises go on the recent years, the wave of private enterprises and the ebb of state-owned companies have driven more and more listed companies to fall into the hands of individuals. The ultimate controllers of a number of companies have switched from state-owned to private enterprises. However, the private enterprises owners manipulate the share price by taking advantage of information disclosure and expropriate the companies and the minority shareholders. For instance, so-called"the top case of year 2007"—share price manipulation of Hangxiao Ganggou, is the best prove that the management are in collusion with the controlling shareholders, release falsehood to affect the price and seek private benefits. So, how to appraise the information quality between private and state-owned companies well and truly is to be an important topic to protect the benefits of minority shareholders. But there are few researches on the information quality between the two types of companies, which is the chief objection of this research.We take earnings quality as the proxy of the information quality. In China, state-owned companies generally are these companies with bigger size, better social status and more responsibility, and they contribute more to the economy development of China. Management know that when disclose information, and they do that more accurately and timely. But as to private companies, we can analysis them from three aspects as follows. The first, the control right percentage of controlling shareholders of private companies is far less than that of state-owned companies, so they tend to enhance their control right, and that supply the conditions for their expropriating. The second, the family members of private enterprises usually take important positions in management or directors of board. Information disclosure would result in opponents, which leads to high cost of disclosing high quality information. So they will limit the information flowing to the outside, including accounting information. The third, the original purpose of financial statement is to appraise the corporate performance and the management abilities by the shareholders and outside users. Because of the direct supervising of controlling shareholders in private companies, they know clearly about the operation and other aspects and that reduces the demand of high quality financial reports. All of those came into our hypothesis: the earnings quality of state-owned companies is better than that of private companies.Meanwhile,it will also take into account the effects of the management ownership and the institutions ownership on the quality of information. Based on the agency theory, when the managers own some shares according to contracts (eg. share compensation) , their interests are line to the interests of shareholders. And the more they have, and the more obvious the alignment effect is. And that will stimulate the managers to improve the quality. Besides, we consider that it is good to their reputation in the labor markets. Compared with individual investor, the institution investors have more information advantages. On the one hand, institution investors are more willing to spend recourses collecting information; on the other hand, they maybe have some private information. With more sophisticated and experienced team and more information channels, institution investors are more likely to distinguish the disclosure policies, supervise the listed companies, make the companies reduce the manipulation and improve the earnings quality.The paper use earnings response coefficient (ERC) and earnings management models to measure the earnings quality. By using the data from 2002 to2005, we find that, the earnings quality of state-owned companies is better than that of private companies.Meanwhile, the higher institution investors'ownership is, the higher the earnings quality is. That prove the institution investors indeed improve the corporate earnings quality. However, we don not find the positive relation between the management ownership and the earnings quality. We believe that this is due to a low level of management shareholdings. In addition, we also found that the higher earnings per share, the larger the assets, the lower the system risk is the quality of information disclosure is higher. In the robust test, when using the information disclosure examining results in"credibility file"on net of Shenzhen security exchange as the substitute measure of information quality,we conclude that the earnings quality of state-owned companies are better than that of private companies and the positive relation between the institution investors ownership and the earnings quality. Our hypothesis is still supported.Based on the conclusions of this paper, we put forward to three proposals. The first, listed companies should strengthen the quality of information disclosure. Listed companies should disclose information timely, accurately and completely strictly accordance with the requirements of the "Company Law", "Securities Act" as well as other information disclosure requirements and supply effective protection of minority shareholders. The second, China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) should reinforce the supervision on information disclosure of listed companies, especially on private companies. The third, improve the ownership structure, increase the level of management ownership appropriately. The increase of the level of management ownership would stimulate the management to improve quality of information disclosure and the companies performance.The research mainly has two features. Firstly, Measure the earnings quality from the accounting basis and market basis at the same time and the measurement of earnings quality should be more accurate. Secondly, we do our research involved in a special period: from 2002 to 2005. During this period, China's stock market was in downturn, and our governments have also performed some fundamental reforms. We perform the research about the earnings quality under the institutional environment.