The Empirical Research On The Effect Of Capital Structure On Voluntary Information Disclosure Of Listed Companies In China

The full effective information disclosure is the comerstone of capital market's effective revolution,and the information disclosed by listed companies plays an important role in preventing fraud.Catagorized by information supervision,there are mandatory information disclosure and voluntary information disclosure.On the base of mandatory information disclosure, voluntary information disclosure makes information disclosure of corporate more complete and specific,and improves the quality of information disclosure of corporate,assists to get rid of information dissymmetry and incompleteness,in realizing fairness and efficiency of capital market, in promoting effective disposition of the capital.Along with the development of security market, voluntary information disclosure is receiving more attention from the investor,supervising department,listed company and creditor and so on.The voluntary information disclosure is a more attractive and important topic for both theoreticians and positivists.Foreign scholars have done lots of studies on voluntary disclosure,but not too much related studies in domestic research,especially on empirical research.Because of the affection of unique economy environment,securities business development and government management,listed companies' in China capital structure has some unique features;so many foreign researches result on voluntary disclosures are not fit for listed Chinese companies effectively.So, this paper empirically examines the linkages between companies' capital structure and the level of voluntary disclosures in annual financial report provided by listed Chinese companies.Under the background of voluntary information disclosure being regarded to be important,and considering shortage research on correlation between voluntary information disclosure and capital structure in our country,the thesis examines how capital structure of listed Company influences the level of voluntary disclosure theoretically and empirically.This thesis is under the constructure as follows:Firstly,this thesis begins with the theory system of voluntary information disclosure,which includes concept,theory foundation and practice motivation and so on.Referring to some scholars' methods such as Meek's index and Botosan's index and other important researches,the paper uses content analytical method to contrive a voluntary disclosure checklist which includes strategic information,financial information and non-financial information,36 items,and suits to the disclosure practice of our market to scale the level of voluntary disclosure.At the same time,the paper introduces the theory of capital structure,analyzes capital structure conditions and interest of financing in our country.Based on the deep research of voluntary information disclosure and capital structure,the thesis analyzes the mechanism about how the capital structure of listed companies influences the voluntary information disclosure.Then,the research randomly selects 100 listed companies' annual financial reports under strict control conditions in manufacturing industry in Shanghai Stock Exchange and computes the sample firms' voluntary disclosure index according to the amount of voluntary disclosure provided in annual reports impersonally.And we conducts empirical research about linkage between capital structure and voluntary information disclosure from short-term financial leverage,long-term financial leverage,total financial leverage employing multivariate linear regression.Empirical study shows there is no positive and highly significant association between short-term financial leverage,total financial leverage and voluntary information index.And there is no direct association between long-term financial leverage and voluntary information index.To summarize,the voluntary information level is influenced feebly by the liabilities factor containing short-term liabilities, long-term liabilities.Finally,based on the results of the theoretical and empirical studies,considering the special characters of securities market and the listing firms,the thesis put forward to some important advices for improving voluntary disclosure information level.From our government and the department of securities supervising,they should make the companies' financing behavior standard,optimize companies' capital structure;advance the reform of debenture bond market;enhance the fluidity debenture bond.Based on the listed companies' angle,they may improve the level of voluntary information disclosure from companies' interior initiatively for the sake of maintaining the better relationship with creditor;develops companies' bond market positively.From the creditors' standpoint,they should play particular restraint functions to debtors,especially commercial banks;strengthen creditor's rights of supervision and the surveillance in voluntary information disclosure;optimize the period of short-term loan capital and long-term loan capital.