The Effects Of The Timeliness Of Accounting Earnings On Corporate Governance Structures Of Listed Firms

Accounting information quality and corporate governance are both hot topics in academic and practice fields. Many researchers investigated how the corporate governance affects the accounting information quality in order to explore their complex interactions,but they did not pay much attention to the effects of accounting information on corporate governance.This paper chooses timeliness of accounting earnings as the representative of information quality,and investigates how corporate governance structures vary with it.The hypotheses predicts that for firms with relatively uninformative earnings, the characteristics of their corporate governance structures will be those that assist costly monitoring activities by shareholders and directors to make up for the inadequacy of earnings.This paper uses 426 companies'data from Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchange,and analyses the relationship between the timeliness of accounting earnings and corporate governance. The result indicates a significant negative relation between the concentration of stock ownership and the timeliness of accounting earnings.However the board composition, the structure of executive compensation and the institution investor's behavior are not strongly affected by the timeliness of accounting earnings.It suggests that the timeliness of accounting earnings is an important determinant of corporate governance structures of listed firms in China and can deduce the agency cost,but its influence is limited.